Roy Beers: Scotland's glass looks to be half empty

The country's finest licensing legal minds were there to discuss the way the run-up to the country's new Licensing (Scotland) Act is shaping.

The news wasn't good. The biggest shakeup to licensing in Scotland since the 70's won't,. these experts say, be all right on the night.

The transition to the new system starts in February, and is expected to cause a bureaucratic log-jam of epic proportions, but will the new Act "work" when it's fully up and running?

I won't try to take you through the nightmarish paper chase of clauses and amendments which has marked the staggering-drunk progress of the new Act into law - even the serious anoraks are showing clear signs of wilting.

The situation as viewed by the legal fraternity is maybe best summed up in a speech from head of BII Scotland Janet Hood, who's also a high profile licensing lawyer.

She said the original bold and imaginative plan of a few years ago has somehow mutated into a cumbersome and even illogical beast fraught with lurking problems.

A lot more hassle with no real gain for anyone, is how she sees Scotland's brave new licensing world developing.

Perhaps worst of all from a publican's point of view, 'though, is that possibly the least appetising part of the whole project appears to have been left until last - the dreaded "draft local conditions".

This is where licensing boards (it is argued) have surpassed themselves in devising cunning new ways to make it all but impossible to run a "normal" bar successfully.

Anything within range which is not broken is "fixed" - as witness crackpot draft (and indeed 'daft') proposals for 'vertical drinking' curbs in local bars.

However - and this is maybe worth noting in the tourist itinerary - you will still be allowed to stand at the bar in Perth!

At the same time, 'though, if you want to sit outside a bar there you may have to order a "knife and fork" meal - a mere drink on its own is out of the question, and a sandwich won't do either.

Just to make it more fun every local authority area will have its own special local rules - giving lawyers representing pubcos operating across several areas no shortage of things to do.

Then to cap it all, the publicans rage, we have government initiatives like Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill's wildly unpopular attempt to force late-opening venues to pay a special anti-disorder levy.

The smoke is still clearing from last year's advent of the smoking ban in Scotland, and there remain ongoing attempts to force or cajole pubs to go down the polycarbonates route. Fees are set to rocket too.

In Glasgow an entirely harmless promotion whereby the Caledonian Brewery would give people a modest but nonetheless welcome amount of free beer on a collector card mechanic - 3.8% abv session ale Deuchar's IPA in prime condition, no doubt - is "strengstens verboten".

Local policy forbids promos reckoned to induce people to drink alcohol. Half a pint too many of Deuchar's, it's implied, might turn my amiable Dr Jekyill into a thuggish, bulgy-eyed Glaswegian Mr Hyde.

But never mind, because forty minutes in the express train to Edinburgh will take you or me to, for the sake of argument, the splendidly funky-trad Malt Shovel in the Scottish capital's raffish-but-fun Cockburn Street - where no such strictures apply.

This "over the county line" syndrome is going to make life very complicated, with a proliferation of such nonsense across the whole country.

One legal eagle told me: "The bright side of all this is you journalists will have no shortage of stuff to write about."

True, of course - but will we still have decent, honest, normal local pubs to enjoy a beer in once we've written it?

And another nagging wee question: once Scotland has achieved the full plastic tumbler, smoke-free, low-cholesteerol, 'two pints max per customer' heaven … will the same sort of people still be getting just as blitzed at weekends as before?