Apathy Sketchpad

A while ago, Scottish authorities decided to do something about their drinking problem. Er, Scotland’s drinking problem that is, not the authorities’.

The main points in summary. Ministers want to increase the offsales age from 18 to 21, to set a minimum price for drink based on alcohol content, to end discount offers, to introduce alcohol-only checkouts at big shops, to levy a social responsibility fee on some retailers and to boost spending to address alcohol problems.

Now, ending discount offers I think might help. When you’re selling soft drinks with vodka in them cheaper than regular soft drinks, three bottles at a time, you’re basically selling drunkenness, not refreshment. That’s targeted at the problem. That’s a sensible policy. A minimum price per unit of alcohol sounds not unreasonable too — it’s a small change from the existing alcohol duty.

I can’t work out what use a “social responsibility fee” will be. According to the proposals (pdf link),

We propose that a fee should be applied to some alcohol retailers to help offset the costs of dealing with the adverse consequences of alcohol and invite views on our proposals. We do not intend that this would apply to small businesses where the sale of alcohol is incidental to the main purpose of the business and the amount of alcohol sold may be small.

The aim being that “the costs associated with the wider impacts of a commercial activity should be borne by those who benefit from it”. Well, okay, but we already have alcohol duty — if you want to tax people based on how much alcohol they sell, raise the duty on it. That won’t work and this won’t either. If the cost is high enough to affect business then the drunken vandals will just go elsewhere, maybe to a small business where the sale of alcohol is incidental to the main purpose of the business and the amount of alcohol sold may be small. Or to a pub, which isn’t covered by the proposals.

But mostly, I think it’s insane to try raising the age from 18 to 21. The minimum ages for various activities in this country are messed up enough already without moving them any further apart. So their theory is that you can have sex with your girlfriend at 16, marry her at 18, but you can’t have a glass of wine with her in front of the TV until you’re 21? That is fucking mental, and that’s before you start considering the civil liberties implications of banning about 200,000 people from off-licenses just because you can’t control vandalism. I find it impossible to believe that even 5% of those people are problematic, which would leave 190,000 people, all old enough to vote, essentially being discriminated against by the government, based on their age. Really, who thought that would be smart? Certainly none of these people did.

They tried these ideas in one town, and they say it’s helped, reducing various measures of crime by around half. But they’ve tested a whole raft of ideas all at once as a package, for a short time. We’ve no idea if it would work in other places, for longer times or which of the ideas helped. And it doesn’t address the civil liberties issues.