Kenneth Roy
One for the road

On the morning of Hogmanay, I slithered along King Street (as you do these days) as far as Marks and Spencer, and bought a few odds and ends, including a bottle of fizzy wine (£5.99). At the check-out, the bottle was confiscated by the school prefect behind the till. 'You can't buy alcohol,' she said. 'Why not?' 'You can't buy alcohol until after 10,' she said. I looked at my watch (9.20) and thought of all the Kilmarnock boozers who were about to be saved by this vital 40-minute delay.
     Back at the office, I read in the Scotsman that 'police and council officials are advising partygoers to wrap up warm, as forecasters predict a chilly night'. What is news? If police and council officials advised partygoers to leap naked into the streets, that would be news. If any council officials had actually been at work on Hogmanay, that would be news. If the police ever helped an old lady across the street, that would be news. But the rest is just another press release from the nanny state. Oliver Tree was the luckless reporter assigned to cover these official statements of the obvious. I must buy poor Mr Tree a drink sometime – only after 10am, of course.
     'Dr Charles Swainson...' – ah, Dr Swainson. Where there is the least potential for excess, there is sensible Dr Swainson to put an end to it. The medical director of NHS Lothian, sometimes reverently described as a 'health chief', told Oliver Tree:
     'It's really important that, when the weather is cold, people take care about how much they drink because the effects of the alcohol are made much worse in cold weather.'
     Dr Swainson knows about the effects of alcohol in cold weather. He is paid £230,000 by NHS Lothian to get these things right.

For most of the Christmas and New Year holiday, including that sneaky little extra Monday the Scots insist on, the official brigade of the joyless knew what was good for us and, equally certainly, what was not. The BBC obligingly kept on its Scottish news website for almost a week the dire warnings by Scotland's 'health chiefs' of the effects of alcohol abuse. Dr Swainson and his chums, the medical directors of the 14 area health boards, chose Christmas week to write to every MSP in support of the Scottish Government's proposal for minimum alcohol pricing.
     There is a pub in Kilmarnock where a pint of lager costs 99 pence (all these years after decimalisation, all these chilly nights later, I am still averse to the usage 99p). A reader of the Scottish Review, a left-wing activist, drinks there regularly because the beer is so cheap. If he walked 100 yards to the more convivial Goldberry Arms, where Willie McIlvanney is to be found when he's in town, the same pint – well, not quite the same one, for it would be stale by the time he got there – would be £2.60.
     The case, then, for minimum alcohol pricing seems inescapable. For one pint at the Goldberry Arms, you may have 2.6 pints at the other place. You have a chance of staying sober in Willie McIlvanney's pub, almost no chance at the other place. Game set and Pomegranate juice to Dr Charles 'Worth every penny' Swainson.
     Yet still I must oppose minimum alcohol pricing.
     Part of the reason, I confess, is an instinctive hostility to being told what to do by the likes of Dr Swainson, the police, 'council officials', 'Hello there' weather forecasters, school prefects in Marks and Spencer, 'the motoring organisations' and anyone called 'an expert'. Experts are the people who brought us the Millennium Bug and temporary mortuaries for the 65,000 victims of swine flu in Britain this winter.
     But there is a more philosophical objection. The 'health chiefs' are concerned with one thing and one thing only: their objective is to minimise the demands on the National Health Service by keeping people sober for as long as possible. They tend to push impressive facts in your face: for example, if you refrain from drinking alcohol, you may expect to live an extra five years (I've just made that up, but it may well be true). This betrays a certain lack of understanding of what makes us, and keeps us, human. I have news – real news – for the 'health chiefs' and I guarantee they won't like it. Sadly, from their point of view, health is not the only thing that matters to most people. Other things matter.
     Orwell – why isn't he alive to witness what is going on? his absence is increasingly inconvenient and annoying – named these other things as 'friendship, hospitality and the heightened spirits and change of outlook that one gets by drinking in good company'. Offhand, Orwell couldn't remember a single poem in praise of water. He found it hard to imagine what one could say about water. It quenches thirst. Any advance on that? The poets, however, started turning out stuff about wine the very day the fermentation of the grape was first discovered. Beer, too, has had a good press. It is much the same with food. Orwell challenges us to think of any memorable prose in praise of vitamins, or the importance – no doubt Dr Swainson and his chums are quite hot on this – of masticating everything 32 times.

Apart from the philosophical objection to minimum alcohol pricing, there is a question of fairness. In the very unlikely event that our 14 'health chiefs' ever strayed from their strict diet of mineral water, and found themselves in the Goldberry Arms supping a pint of foaming ale, the bill for £2.60 would be the pettiest of cash. Assuming Dr Swainson, for example, pays most of his tax at 40%, he has disposable income of around £11,500 a month; a prudent visit to the Goldberry Arms would still leave him with £11,497.40. Consider, on the other hand, the young, unemployed, graduate teacher with a disposable income of £220.78 a month (the job-seeker's allowance), £11.279.22 less than Dr Swainson. For that luckless soul, one pint a week at the Goldberry Arms would set him (or her) back £10.40 a month – almost 5% of disposable income. Could we blame the young, unemployed, graduate teacher if he strayed to the other place and knocked back two?
     It is, in a perverse way, quite cheering that so many people in this deeply unhappy country ignored the advice of the 'health chiefs' and went on an unholy bender in the last fortnight. If the 'health chiefs' wonder why the rest of us do not take them at all seriously, they should look at themselves in the mirror and consider for a moment their own privileged lives, their own colossal salaries, their own bloated pension pots – and cease to interfere in the lives of others.