The new temperance movement

It's easier to demonise drink than to tackle the personal and social problems that drive its misuse.

Image by blue2finger via Pixabay

Scotland’s relationship with alcohol is said to be unhealthy but our approach to remedying it seems just as dubious. The creeping back onto the political agenda of minimum pricing is a timely example.

Mithering by our betters about the drinking habits of the hoi polloi is nothing new and, in the mid-19th century, gave birth to prohibitionist campaigns like the Scottish Temperance League. Mind you, today’s tippling is near teetotal compared to the prodigious quantities the Scots put away back then.

The historian TC Smout notes: ‘In the 1830s, the population aged 15 and over was drinking, on average, the equivalent of a little under a pint each of duty-charged whisky a week.’ Everyone talks about ‘the good old days’ but it’s nice to pinpoint the exact decade.

The middle-class fusspots and moral crusaders of the Temperance League are alive today in outfits like Alcohol Focus Scotland, which is behind a new campaign to increase minimum pricing. A market floor of 50p per unit was introduced for alcohol sales in 2012 and, following a protracted legal battle, came into effect in 2018. Now the booze-control lobby want the minimum unit price hiked to 65p.

Alison Douglas, chief executive of Alcohol Focus Scotland, told the BBC: ‘We've seen that minimum unit pricing can have a positive effect. We need to off-set both the effects of inflation and of the pandemic, and adjust the minimum unit price to a level that will save more lives and prevent a new generation from developing an unhealthy relationship with alcohol.’

The evidence on the effectiveness of minimum pricing is a mixed bag and advocates and opponents of the policy like to cherry-pick from the various studies. Supporters brandish research published in the Lancet by Anderson et al, which concludes that minimum pricing is ‘an effective alcohol policy option to reduce off-trade purchases of alcohol and should be widely considered’. However, this same paper reports that, among the households that buy the most booze, ‘the lowest income households did not seem to reduce the amount of alcohol they purchased, and their expenditure on alcohol increased’.

Critics prefer the Millard, Katikireddi et al study, which ‘found no strong evidence that minimum unit pricing had reduced alcohol consumption or harm’. What they tend not to quote is the authors’ explanation for this: ‘We think that the reason that we found no effect either way from minimum unit pricing could be that the minimum price was too low to make a difference.’

What we do know is that deaths linked to alcohol have not fallen since minimum pricing was introduced. In fact, quite the opposite. Figures released in August by National Records of Scotland recorded 1,190 alcohol-specific deaths in 2020, a 17 per cent spike on the 2019 figure of 1,020. Nicola Sturgeon is coming under pressure on pricing at Holyrood, too. 

At First Minister’s Questions, there were three questions from three different parties urging a more draconian pricing policy. Sturgeon claimed that, before Covid-19 hit, ‘we were seeing early and very encouraging signs of a reduction in alcohol sales and in alcohol-specific deaths’. She also maintained that ‘any change to the level, or to any detail, of the minimum unit pricing policy must have a robust evidence base’. 

It’s hard to know exactly what Sturgeon is thinking, or whether she’ll still be thinking the same thing tomorrow, but the wording of her answers hinted at a mind not yet made up. (She also pivoted at one point to lamenting how much more difficult it will be to administer the policy under the UK Internal Market Act. The potential for grievance, rather than any matter of principle, will always take precedence for the First Minister.) 

Minimum pricing has been in place for three years and the jury is still very much out. To double down on a policy that might turn out to be less effective than its proponents asserted would be foolhardy enough, but especially so at such an early stage.

As well as more time to build up an evidence base, there needs to be room for an honest assessment of the legislation. Perhaps the floor price does have to be raised for the mechanism to have the desired effect, but if that is the case, it means the policy currently doesn’t work. That must be reflected upon before the same ministers start tinkering with the same legislation. If they got it wrong before, how can we be confident they won’t get it wrong again?  

After all, the proposition here is that 50p-per-unit didn’t do the trick but another 15p will. Where is the evidence for this? What happens if 65p doesn’t cut it? How long before another call goes up from the paternalistic blob of policy-makers and policy-shapers for £1 — or more? 

The blob is a handy counterargument to those who say the slippery slope is a logical fallacy. Just as today there are ideologues in government and civil society bodies champing at the bit to ban smoking altogether, it will not take them long to arrive at a similar stance on booze. Few zeals are as intoxicating as that of the health reformer. The moral reformer believes he is in the business of saving souls; the health evangelist is certain he is saving lives. If they stubbornly refuse to be saved, it is because he was not preaching his scripture ardently enough — not because his gospel is wrong. 

One of the least edifying aspects of this debate is the implication that those sceptical of minimum unit pricing either don’t understand or don’t care about the personal and social harms that alcohol misuse can cause. Not only is this untrue, there is more than a little projection going on. For minimum pricing is the ideal policy for a government that cannot, will not or does not know how to begin addressing the underlying social problems that contribute to alcohol dependency and misuse. The sort of government that cuts funding for alcohol support services along with those for drug addiction then panics when the statistical rounds come bearing the consequences. 

Alcohol dependency is a symptom. You can try to alleviate it or even eradicate it, but another flare-up will break out somewhere else. Unless you attack the root causes of poverty, trauma, mental ill-health, family breakdown and unemployment, you are doing nothing more remedial than appending a sticking plaster to a gaping wound. That’s the problem with a government that believes fundamental transformation can come only with independence: it can’t — or doesn’t want to — get things done in the here and now.

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Fergus Mutch, the SNP’s former head of communications, has caused a stir by questioning Nicola Sturgeon’s opposition to Cambo oil field.

The past parliamentary candidate asked whether the Scottish Government had found ‘100,000 new green jobs and magically phase[d] out domestic demand for oil and gas’. If not, Sturgeon’s stance ‘gets us unemployment and more imported oil for decades’. 

Mutch is a stalwart of the SNP Right, the once-dominant tendency that’s now so diminished it’s just him and Fergus Ewing looking grumpy all the time. The other Fergus was particularly peeved last week, warning ‘our kaftan-clad colleagues’ in the Scottish Greens against making the government ‘anti-road’ rather than ‘anti-emission’.

What these interventions illustrate is the gap between the SNP (1934-2014) and the Sturgeon Party (2014-present). Where the SNP put petroleum at the centre of its case for independence from the 1970s onwards, the Sturgeon Party will put 100,000 Scots out of work in the hopes of securing the leader an approving write-up in the New York Times. It’s Scotland’s dole. 

The old SNP was fighting for independence, not fighting culture wars. The two Ferguses are hopelessly wrong about the constitution but they understand the purpose of a nationalist party and the duty of its leader. It’s about getting Scots to follow you on independence, not getting Jacinda Ardern to follow you on Twitter.

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Originally published in the Scottish Daily Mail on November 22, 2021.

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