Every time Sturgeon’s on television I feel myself reaching for the bottle

ALTHOUGH drinking is banned in the Commons Chamber, tradition decrees that, at any point during a budget speech, the Chancellor may hit the hard stuff if he or she so chooses.

I don’t know how the tradition started. Perhaps a degree of pity was felt for the nation’s book balancer delivering often bad news. Maybe the steel to go through with it customarily came from the stiffener in the glass.

Watching Nicola Sturgeon’s ‘prohibition’ speech this week, I felt a different tradition coming on. It would dictate that, at any point during a First Ministerial announcement on yet more freedoms taken from us, a visit to the drinks cabinet by victims of said curbs was a wholly proportionate response.

In truth, the point in Miss Sturgeon’s speech where my mind began playing on possible intoxicants to get me through it came before she actually said anything.

And what she said made the effort to resist reaching for a bottle as challenging as I’ve experienced on a Wednesday afternoon.

What she said in effect plunges us into some surreal prohibition era fortnight where bars and restaurants are either required to close by dint of their geography or else allowed to open inside only in the daytime and only to sell soft drinks there.

Freedoms

Those outside the Central Belt determined to drink alcohol on licensed premises will have to do so in beer gardens, but only until the 10pm curfew arbitrarily imposed during an earlier incursion on freedoms.

The weekend forecast for Aberdeen, by the way – the biggest city where such conviviality remains an option – is scattered showers and northerly breezes. Enjoy.

And what of the two-thirds of Scots whose local watering holes and eateries are now banned for most of the month from trading?

Does a s ober October beckon? Are our political masters in some sense doing our livers a favour?

It would be naïve to suppose so. Indeed, if you can bear a trip to the supermarket now that two-metre distancing and one-way systems are back, witness the buzz of activity around the wine and beer.

It would be naïve, too, to suppose that all this booze is to be drunk in strict accordance with the latest tranche of Scottish Government diktats, the rationale for which, by the week, becomes more flimsy.

We know much more about the virus now than we did in March, Miss Sturgeon tells us, and she is perhaps more on the money there than she knows.

The ‘we’ I suspect she has in mind are politicians, public health experts, scientific advisers, number crunchers...

The truth is we all know much more about the virus than we did before and are beginning to make our decisions accordingly.

Most of us are savvier, too, about the integrity of government decision-making in the autumn of 2020 than we were in the spring.

Weeks ago, for example, we were accepting inducements to Eat Out to Help Out by one government; now another government slaps a temporary ban on the whole business of eating out, suggesting we were merely helping out the spread of the virus.

Who are we meant to believe – and when, if ever? Increasingly that is a question of personal judgment.

None of this, of course, is to suggest that no restrictions are necessary. Even if personal health risks may be a matter for us, the risk of spreading the virus to others is rightly a matter for government.

The problem is that trust in government judgment is evaporating steadily and, just as the prohibition era ushered in a vast subculture of illicit drinkers who considered they knew better than US lawmakers 100 years ago, so a subculture of Scots considers today that Nicola Sturgeon does not run their lives.

Clandestine

Expect plenty of drinking at home, then, and not necessarily in our designated household groups. Expect doors in your neighbourhood to be opened a few inches and visiting parties, bottles of grog in hand, to be sneaked in.

Expect these clandestine drinking sessions to become an open secret and expect neighbours remaining within the law – as I propose to do – not to entirely disapprove.

After seven long months of often unreasonable restrictions during which even sitting alone on a park bench was outlawed, we are, I suspect, not the nation of wild- eyed scaredy-cats we once were.

Covid is among us. It’s here for the long haul, and, after the initial panic, more philosophical strains of thought are nestling. Well, we have to die of something, says one such strain, and, looking at the statistics, it probably won’t be coronavirus.

We will take protective measures – perhaps radical ones. I heard Edinburgh University emeritus professor of public health Raj Bhopal say this week he’d start shaking hands again in the year 2025.

I may make it a Jonathan rule to avoid public transport long after Nicola Sturgeon or her successors tell us it’s safe to climb aboard again.

The point i s that, after months of being spoon-fed dos and don’ts by a government with no discernible strategy beyond knee-jerk bans, people are taking ownership of their futures under Covid.

They’ll do so all the more as constraints proliferate – brazenly if there is scant evidence to justify them. The architects of prohibition i n America emerged looking rather daft.

Come late October, I wonder if the Scottish Government will feel the same.