Sturgeon’s bossy, eat-your-vegetables government treats us all like children John MacLeod

FIVE years ago, as the measure finally made it through the Scottish parliament, I was all for the minimum pricing of alcohol.

The SNP proposal was endorsed by many responsible medical bodies. It has long been a truism that alcohol abuse is directly linked to the price and availability of hooch and it is a serious, very visible problem in my own island community.

Half a decade on, news yesterday that the UK Supreme Court had unanimously upheld the legislation – against the protracted legal challenge led by the Scotch Whisky Association – inspired only a hollow groan.

For in half a decade it has become evident that the SNP – thrilled by the unwonted experience of an overall majority; intoxicated by the independence referendum – has become obsessed with legislating on everything it can think of, sticking its nanny state oar into all manner of things that are not the business of this or any other government.

It does so with no sense of proportion, no thought of unintended consequences, no regard for the mounting cost of supervising more and more aspects of our lives and in ever more contempt for ordinary people, private individuals and the right of personal choice.

And there is an uncomfortable sense that this is, year by year, less and less about the prudent administration of a country and more a selfrighteous crusade – as if, in some barking social experiment, we must all be moulded increasingly in the likeness of Saint Nicola.

No one denies that many Scots have a problem with drink and that, the damage to personal health apart, it fuels much crime, violence, family breakdown and domestic abuse.

But the sort of people who breakfast on Buckfast are least likely to listen to the strictures of Health Secretary Shona Robison and First Min- ister Sturgeon. And the minimum pricing legislation is not even well drafted.

It will not affect pubs in the slightest (which is why breweries and the licensed trade so enthusiastically support the measure); most high- end, branded drinks will be unaffected and the surcharge will not even benefit the public purse. It will, i nstead, be trousered by the retailer.

But the noisy, much-hyped, carpet-bombing nature of the Act is typical of so much illthought, badly scrutinised legislation now washing daily round our startled ankles f rom the Nationalists in Edinburgh.

As if – in this given instance – you and your significant other, partaking of a Pinot Grigio with tonight’s linguine alle vongole as Vivaldi tinkles on the Blaupunkt, are of entire moral equivalence to a fat man in a vest getting blitzed down the park on a gallon of super-strength cider.

Casualty

Of course, you are not but an immediate casualty of the measure will be those pleasant, high- end supermarket ‘meal deals’ offering a perfectly respectable reheatable dinner for two, plus a bottle of cheerful plonk, for a tenner.

And where might this end? For, if we have learned one thing about devolved Scottish government, once our pink little MSPs have a bee in their collective bonnet, it is never the end.

In 2006, the Scottish Government banned smoking in enclosed public places. Now cigarettes must be hidden from sight at the point of sale as i f they were the worst pornography.

Now we are bombarded by assorted Scottish Government adverts – which we pay for – chiding us and capped, now, by the uneasy sense that Shona Robison t ut- t uts disapprovingly over your shoulder in the drinks aisle down your local Tesco and a sense that high-sugar, high-fat foods will be next for the sledgehammer of legislation.

There has long been a distinctly bossy-bags, eat-your-vegetables air in Scottish governance. It can be traced back to Tom Johnston’s fabled command of the Scottish Office during the war and the reams of instructions and reproofs issued, for instance, to expectant mums, over the decades, by the old Scottish Home and Health Department. There is a marked whiff, then and now, of something very deep in the Scottish psyche – a bourgeois, even patrician, disdain for working class pleasures, evident for more than 200 years.

But things are now plumbing new, obsessive depths. Of late, the SNP Government, especially under Nicola Sturgeon, has increasingly behaved at once as encroaching despotism, increasingly probing into realms that are neither the place of commerce or the state – voluntary civic society; the churches; and the family – and a sort of saintly Lady Bountiful visiting her humble tenants with bowls of soup.

The gruesome Baby Box – complete with i cky Scots verse and, incongruously, a packet of condoms – is just one manifestation. The damnable Named Person legislation is another, not least in its assumption that a teacher or social worker cares more about your child than you do.

More and more, we witness absurd and unintended consequences of ill-judged law. Certain silly, sentimental Irish songs can be crooned – quite lawfully – in your own living room, or clot CDs you can buy no less lawfully on the high street.

But it is now a criminal matter to sing them at a football match and, as one astonished sheriff grasped, criminal to sing them out of doors even if no living soul is in earshot to be conceivably offended. The SNP Government blithely slashed the l egal drink- drive limit and then watched on as pubs folded all over the countryside and rural golf club houses found themselves in crisis.

And i t created s i ngle, centralised emergency services, which suddenly found themselves for the first time paying VAT, even as guntoting cops strutted about sleepy Highland villages.

What is under way is an unnerving and fundamental change between Scottish Government and governed. These people are not, properly, our masters.

Choices

They are our servants. Yet they increasingly vaunt themselves as the enlightened arbiters of all that is right and good and true; increasingly treating us as errant children incessantly to be bossed about, to be denied the right to make our own informed choices.

They are driven by the leaders of a party which forbids candid debate and robust discussion within its own ranks; which permits only the most biddable lock-step minions to stand for public office under its colours.

But there is another issue of concern. There were troubling signs yesterday that the Scottish Tories do not plan to make a fight of minimum pricing. All the political parties signed up, initially and with joy, to the Named Person proposals and, since the advent of devolution in 1999, there has been f ar t oo much unhealthy agreement between them – the constitution apart – and very little responsible scrutiny of legislation.

The SNP having now so successfully stifled dissent within i ts own ranks, that must urgently change. We have had a surfeit of Scottish Government law pitched to protect us against everything from sectarian song to overly sugared pop.

It is high time politicians began protecting us from the Scottish Government.