Price of pleasure
ALCOHOL minimum pricing seems more to do with hitting the working man’s pleasures than a serious attempt to end problem drinking.
No more discounts on a modest blended whisky or a case of standard lager – yet the price of prosecco and tonic wine are unchanged.
And Health Secretary Shona Robison is running around as if she has found a cure for alcoholism!
J. CAMPBELL, Paisley, Renfrewshire. I TOTALLY agree with John MacLeod ( Mail) – the alcohol minimum pricing policy is the final straw and if the First Minister thinks this will solve the problem of binge drinking or alcoholism, then she is delusional.
All the bribes and incentives – free prescriptions, baby boxes etc – will not deflect former SNP supporters such as myself from questioning if this t is what we really want from our o government.
Personally, I am embarrassed that ours is the first country in the world to introduce alcohol minimum pricing. in It presents Scotland as a nation of drink- sodden wastrels with no self-control.
MARgARET SPEIRS, via email. STATe paternalism operates under the guise of protecting us from ourselves s but it ends in the destruction of o liberty and responsibility.
The state isn’t an abstract entity, but a bunch of ministers and bureaucrats whose mismanagement of our police, health and education demonstrates that they are too incompetent to supervise our private lives.
In the last decade, the pervasive authoritarianism and centralising tendencies of our Nationalist regime has h made Scotland the most intrusive s of europe’s nanny states yet its policies rarely yield the desired outcome they were created to achieve.
Consider the Orwellian Named Person scheme, bans on smacking and football songs, plus limitations on o what the little people do at home h such as smoking or eating junk ju food.
Fracking bans and wind turbine subsidies s i ncrease fuel poverty, perverse drugs laws fill our prisons and alcohol’s minimum pricing is simply Prohibition for the poor. REv JoHn CAMERon,
St Andrews, Fife. YeS, let’s get tough on alcohol. Step one: shut down the subsidised bars at Holyrood and Westminster. JIM DRuMMonD, Edinburgh.