Poor Philip Laing. How desperately he must wish he could turn back the clock to the start of freshers’ week. Please God, just a tweak of the time machine. Give me the chance to live this one again. This time I’ll listen to the warnings my mum gave me.

This time I won’t drink a bottle of whisky before I join the organised student drinking session; and this time I won’t get into a state where I don’t know where I am or what I’m doing, and end up a blind, comatose drunk piddling over the poppies on a war memorial. Because I didn’t do it deliberately; I didn’t mean to offend. I was just one of thousands of stupid, immature kids doing what was expected of me and getting paralytic with booze.

The hapless Laing, unfortunately for him, has gone from being an anonymous, hope-filled 19-year-old at the start of his university life to a nationally reviled lout, symbolic of all that is rotten in Britain. That is a pretty heavy burden, and, one has to say, also a rather unfair one.

Yesterday the sports technology student at Sheffield Hallam University pleaded guilty to outraging public decency — are we really outraged? — and was told he could face jail. He will find out his fate at the end of the month.

The point is, surely, that no punishment the judge can dish out to Philip Laing can make his situation any more dreadful than it is, or damage his career more than it is already. He has, by virtue of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and on the wrong side of a dangerous amount of alcohol, suffered the most brutal kind of summary justice at the hands of the media. The boy, quite simply, has become an iconic image, part of the new century’s memory bank of shame.

Sarah Lyons is in much the same boat. Frozen for ever in a moment of celebration in the street, a pair of knickers around her ankles, she is, rightly or wrongly, the latest totem of the shameless, binge-drinking, ladette culture, causing chaos on our city streets and stacking up a cirrhosis mountain for the NHS in the future. Imagine, hiss the righteous, being so drunk you don’t care that your knickers have fallen down in the street. Is this what Britain has come to?

The image is stark, powerful and utterly disastrous for the junior-school teaching assistant from Cardiff, who has now been suspended. No matter that, according to her father, the pants were not hers, but a pair of comedy pants her friend had picked up in a bar minutes earlier. And no matter that others said she was not drinking, just larking about. Miss-undie-stood, crowed the tabloids.

The image rules; the realities behind it fade. The subjects are guilty of so much more than their original sin. The boy was insulting the war dead; the girl was a floozy. Their iconic pictures, tragically for them, will survive on the internet, symbols of the years when Britain’s booze culture went out of control.

Laing and Lyons have been silly — no one denies that — but they are merely young people vulnerable to the prevailing norms of behaviour. Of course they don’t deserve the enormity of the price they will pay: we must hope they are given a second chance.

To do otherwise would be grossly unfair. Young men and women have done worse in the past, and will do worse in the future, but the big difference is that no one captured it on film and sold it to the papers.

Thousands of Philip and Sarah’s peers, equally guilty of vulgarity or intoxication, or both, escape without recrimination: but these two must carry the can. Besides, where’s our perspective? Show me a parent of one of today’s students who did not get hopelessly drunk as a teenager as a rite of passage, and I will show you a liar.

In truth, we have been guilty of dancing to a totally phoney moral tune for centuries about alcohol. This is a panic as old as the hills. We sustain breathtaking double standards about criticising alcohol consumption, while encouraging it for revenue and social control. Hogarth’s scenes of the horrors of Gin Lane speak of nothing we are not familiar with today, of a populace kept in its place and yet destroyed by alcohol. The oldest edict of power in the land:

intoxicate the masses and keep them malleable.

For decades politicians have been relaxing the licensing hours to keep the drinks industry sweet, and then wringing their hands at the ensuing social chaos and addiction. The argument rages to this day about minimum pricing — an entirely rational way to tackle the number of young people strewn in the gutters, but politicians run scared of the impact on jobs. Perpetually, the young and the poor are the victims of this duplicity.

Philip Laing was one of around 2,000 university students in Sheffield who each paid £10 to take part, during freshers’ week, in an entirely legal drinking event organised by a private company called Carnage UK. Why weren’t Carnage in the dock? That they weren’t says it all.

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