Chris Maclean: In a world of their own
As an Englishman with Scottish ancestry I sometimes hanker for life above the border. With the advances in education funding, prescription charges and health provisions I see visionary and enlightened government at work. It seems attractive.
Then I see in the trade press that an idiot like the Scottish Justice Secretary can effectively double the licence fees payable claiming it is "frankly unacceptable" that taxpayers subsidise the licensing system and that "the costs of alcohol should be met by those who benefit from the sale of alcohol". Then the attraction vanishes.
Many involved in the British political system argue that the British models exemplify the democratic process and that we should feel lucky to have such a system.
But two things seem to emerge here. Firstly, virtually all government members, and their officers, seem to live in some twisted perception of reality. And the second aspect is that, regardless of what goes on in the real world, they can maintain their own world independently.
When a minister talks of the beneficiaries of alcohol sales he conveniently forgets that the largest share of the income from alcohol, for anyone, is the tax and duty his government takes from it. I cannot lay my hands on the figures but I guess around half of every £2.40 I get for a pint of beer goes back to HMG. With the constant criticism of binge-drinking and alcohol related problems these government ministers conveniently forget the huge amount of money we load into their coffers and the enormous amount of social good we do providing the heart of so many communities. By facilitating cheap alcohol through alternative routes and by leaning heavily on the pub trade the government is effectively strangling its own revenue supply ~ an argument not voiced often enough by the pro-smoking lobby whose cost-benefit ratio is heavily on the side of the government as the health care provider.
Last week my daughter and I visited the Houses of Parliament. It was a stunning experience. The architecture and the details were magnificent. But the extraordinary thing was how different from the real world everything appeared to be. It can scarcely have changed since Victorian times. There were no 'No Smoking' signs, no safety notices, no fire doors with in tumescent strips, few fire extinguishers (those there were hidden), no 'Fire Exit' signs, no visible facilities for people with disabilities and a complete disregard to the statutory health and safety signs and messages they compel us to deface our buildings with. They even have, I am told, three branches of their own personal post offices. No risk of cuts there then. It was a different world.
Last year I invited my local MP to do a session behind the bar as part of the Proud of Pubs Week but he found excuses. This year I'll be asking him well in advance. Hopefully he'll get a taste of the real world out here but somehow I don't think it will make much difference in that place.
