Dram good idea

Tom Morton raises a glass to the Scottish Government’s minimum alcohol pricing legislation

by Tom Morton

The last time I left the Labour Party it was in a state of anger and outrage at the appointment by Jeremy Corbyn of convicted arsonist the Baron Watson of Invergowrie as House of Lords spokesman on education. Or at least that was the final straw. The spark that lit the, ah, flame of discontent and fury in the dodgy curtains of my politics.

But in fact I’ve left the Labour Party before. Twice. Well, once it was just indifference, having joined pretty much by accident when I lived in Scotstoun and membership was almost compulsory. And then I tore up my membership card (Labour Party membership cards are tearable, which I’ve always felt was a design fault) when, in 2008, Labour diligently opposed the SNP Government’s first attempts at legislating on a minimum price for alcohol.

Because it seemed to me (and the entire medical profession, the police and every agency involved in medical care, and anyone who looked at the data) obvious that an increase in the basic unit price of C2H6O would have beneficial effects on the health of binge-drinking Scotland (20 per cent bigger boozers than the English or Welsh). On its society. On its culture. And that the Labour Party’s opposition was based on little more than a slavish acceptance of the alcohol industry’s humanity-hating refusal to stop killing thousands of people a year (roughly 8500 a year in the UK, 1100 in Scotland, which has the highest rates of alcohol-related deaths in Britain), and destroying tens of thousands more related lives. By selling them an addictive drug. Dirt cheap.