minimum price for alcohol
Impassioned plea for a flawed policy
Published: 03/09/2010
HEALTH Secretary Nicola Sturgeon finally confirmed her proposed 45p-a-unit minimum price for alcohol with an impassioned plea for support, likening it to the historic ban on smoking in public places.
It was an unfortunate comparison as the two issues are similar, but different. The sole reason for introducing the ban on smoking was to remove the lethal threat of passive smoking to others, which was costing 1,000 lives a year in Scotland.
There was no proposal to introduce minimum pricing to save the lives of heavy smokers themselves. They were simply told that if they wanted to carry on smoking themselves to death they could do so on the street. Huge increases in tobacco tax in successive Budgets rarely deterred hardened smokers.
In fact, what they were more likely to do was scrimp and save – such as cutting back on children’s clothes, for example – to pay for more-expensive cigarettes. Is this the likely scenario with problem drinkers? We have to ask ourselves if a two-litre bottle of supermarket cider increasing from £1.32 to £3.80 will make much difference. The favourite tipples of young alcohol-abusers and thugs, on the other hand, could be cheaper.
Ms Sturgeon and her supporters in the medical profession bombarded us with statistics, but we have no idea what the methodology was. A respected independent economic consultancy countered by arguing that it would have only a small effect on harmful drinkers, while the vast majority of moderate drinkers would have to spend almost £20million a year more.
When a minority administration has to rely on consensus politics, it cannot use a sledgehammer to drive something through which is full of holes and attracts such strong opposition.