Booze run south of the Border, anyone?
JOHN COOPER’S
ALCOHOL minimum pricing seems more to do with hitting the working man’s simple pleasures, a sort of Prohibition for the less well-off, than a serious attempt at stopping problem drinking.
No more discounts on a case of standard lager or a modest blended whisky, while prosecco is unaffected. Yet to hear Health Secretary Shona Robison, you’d think she’d cured alcoholism.
I wonder if the Scottish Government fancies unleashing full-on Prohibition on those who prefer cider to a fullbodied New World red?
In private moments, do they take a purse-lipped delight in imagining shutting off bar taps, pulling down offlicence shutters, taking an axe to barrels in bonded warehouses?
‘After all, it’s for the people’s own good. We enlightened, high-minded, altruistic politicians want only what’s best for them. If only they’d put down that bottle-opener, we could show them what a utopia Scotland can be under our benign hand…’
Prohibition in the US was the best thing that ever happened – to organised crime. It pitched ordinary people into the Mafia’s avaricious hands as overnight the Volstead Act turned millions guilty of nothing more than enjoying a tipple into criminals.
It gave rise to rebels – moonshiners who coaxed whiskey from corn-mash stills; solid citizens who became outlaws by making gin in their bathtubs.
The effect of this giant experiment in high-handed social engineering was corrosive, showing the citizenry their own government thought them no more than aberrant deviants.
Good intentions may lie behind minimum pricing but such laws infantilise us and strip us of choice – which the SNP thinks we cannot exercise wisely.
Nanny State legislation is invidious. Take the Named Persons plan, founded on the idea parents are hopeless at parenting. Families should be ‘supported’ – read usurped – by state experts. It’s the stuff of a dictator’s dreams.
The public are like a frog in soothingly warm water being incrementally heated to boiling when we start to believe politicians’ ‘We know best’ falsehoods.
‘Ah, well,’ we tell ourselves, ‘we Scots do have a difficult relationship with alcohol. Maybe there’s something to be said for minimum pricing and hiding the gargle behind “booze burkas” on shop shelves like we do now with tobacco…’
IAM just back from Berlin where drink prices are jaw-droppingly low. Skull-splittingly strong Belgian beers with Viking berserkers on the can are to be had for a few coins; domestic brews were the same.
Yet I never saw a drunk and if the average German worker is sozzled, how come they lead European GDP tables?
Why must Nicola Sturgeon breenge in on alcohol where Chancellor Merkel sees no need? Are we so much more childish than Germans?
Maybe we’ll wake from our warm-water torpor to wreak polling-day revenge on politicians over-reaching their remit. Meanwhile, I’m welding shut the doors of my Audi for a moonshiner’s run to England, land of full-fat milk, unrefined honey – and reasonably priced whisky.