Far-fetched call born of sheer desperation

As ways of fending off the impending collapse of large parts of our hospitality industry go, banning supermarkets from selling alcohol may be among the more unlikely being put forward.

There is a heady cocktail recipe of reasons to question the effectiveness, the likelihood and even in some ways the logic of such a radical means of saving struggling pubs and bars from permanent closure.

One could spend hours wrestling with the in and outs of this far-out proposal, discussing its hypothetical pros and cons.

But that would be to miss the point – we should, rather, be looking at why it has been put forward at all.

The answer is that it is an idea born of the sheer desperation now being felt by all those who own licensed premises and by the huge numbers they employ.

Understandable despair too – and anger – as they effectively find themselves the ones asked to sacrifice their livelihoods for the wider good.

Can forcing them to close their doors be justified, no matter whether directly by law or by default under the pressure of restrictions that make remaining open financially unviable?

In the desperately difficult balancing act between preventing the spread of the virus and minimising the impact of lockdowns on the economy, it quite possibly can.

What cannot be justified however is doing so without at the same time providing a package of help which does more than pay lip service to the scale of the losses the trade is sustaining.

The solution here does not lie in punishing one sector in order to help another.

It lies in ministers – at Holyrood and Westminster – finding the means better to protect the individuals who find themselves at the sharp end of our country’s struggle to get through this awful time.