Roy Beers: Legislation looms for Scotland the Blitzed

My only real quarrel with the notion that Scotland is drinking itself to death is the implicit idea that this is somehow a completely new phenomenon.

In point of fact even the worst offenders tend to make it home after a night of alcohol-fuelled revelry, these days - although the body count after a Saturday night in Inverness is reportedly quite high. Whereas had you been partying in Glasgow's Argyle Street in the mid-19th century you'd have noticed many of your fellow revellers collapsing unconscious in the street towards the end of the night - so much so that special flop-houses were set up in which drunks were unceremoniously dumped.

In the 18th century the Statistical Account of Scotland railed against villages where almost everybody appeared to be permanently inebriated. National poet Robert Burns put the battle with the bottle into true perspective in some unforgettable works.

In modern times hard end-of-week drinking sprang from the now largely-vanished culture of factory and shipyard - it was usual for the working man to do all his social drinking in a weekly binge lasting a few hours, and old habits die hard. The big difference is that women have joined them.

So what's new? Well, according to a Sunday broadsheet article, two things. The first is that we're allegedly consuming much stronger drinks than previously - I doubt that's true, or a very significant factor; and, shock horror, we're actually drinking twice as much as we thought we were.

The newly-published NHS Health Scotland report suggests consumption could be verging on double the 17.2 units the average man was said to be drinking per week in 2003. The figure for women is also reckoned much higher than the 6.5 units they were reckoned to be consuming in 2003.

Why the sudden discrepancy? The report will, we're told, in effect say that the system historically used for collecting data is, well, rubbish - and that now we've found out what's really going on we should be very, very afraid.

Licensees should be, particularly. All sorts of well-meaning initiatives are currently being framed by the Scottish government with the aim of tackling Scotland's sometimes fraught relationship with drink, and apart from "polluter pay" zones we can expect much of the rubric informing the policies to be heartily taken up by local licensing boards.

They've a historic tendency to launch local-specific initiatives - for example the failed Glasgow glass ban policy - and we're likely to see more rather than less of these.

This latest damning indictment of the amount we're apparently over-consuming will set the context for energetic legislating and policy-making at all levels.

However yet again we see very little evidence of any finger-wagging at the drinkers, and - yet again - there's the insinuation that higher strengths and new products are somehow luring people into consuming more than they might otherwise.

That argument could certainly be true in some cases, but it can hardly apply to off-trade purchases - where bulk buy and low price is surely an argument, but not variety? Since we're drinking more and more at home, and are - according to the Scottish Licensed Trade Association - "a nation of off trade drinkers" - it's not really tenable.

We're told wine is typically much stronger in bars than five or more years ago, but even allowing for an explosion of interest in wine in pubs (led by women) it's hardly a commanding factor: the typical range of beer strengths, meanwhile, is surely "about right". It's the drinker who is the problem, not the drink.

Pubs which flag up dirt-cheap prices inevitably attract binge drinkers, of course, but in the main I'm not convinced that any of the recent popular standard drink choices - with the exception of shooters, which I'd ban - are any worse than anything we had before: the only thing which has changed is choice.

Government concedes, as elsewhere, that you need a long-developing cultural change to really make a difference. Moves to curb supermarket discount offers or pub happy hours aren't really the biggest problem - and nor are any specific drinks.

But the trade is going to get it in the throat, all the same. Operational costs and restraints could soar, with attendant bureaucracy, to the point where for some the game is no longer worth the candle.

Edinburgh has set the tone by taking on eight of the new Licensing Standards Officers, while Glasgow has just three - evidently because it aims to "stay on top of things" while the Licensing Act beds in.

The two LSO's I met told me they saw their role more as a safety valve than as enforcement, arguing that any reasonable person gets plenty of chances to rectify faults. Better a quick word with them than a report to the board that gives you no time to respond.

But with the pub trade increasingly demonised in the press - you almost never read about pubs in a positive light - there's arguably an increased risk that some over-zealous licensing boards will take extreme measures where they're not really justified: a bit of laughter in the beer garden and you could get a slapped wrist.

Will this new climate of hyper-legislation have much effect on the overall problem of over-consumption? I think it more likely it will simply add to the drift from bars to homes. Alcohol won't become very much dearer in supermarkets in the near future. Relative to pub prices in future it may even get cheaper - I don't know.

Since the same NHS report notes that measures poured at home are typically much larger than in bars we could see a "swings and roundabouts" situation instead of any great fall in consumption.

We've already got "pre-loading", in which thirsty customers take the heat out of the cost of a boozy night by going to the pub "merry".

Cheap foreign holidays where the drink flows freely are a "cultural norm" understood by anyone in Britain - the young market is attuned to bingeing, and will adapt to changing conditions.

But the government is on the warpath, - it has a colossal public health problem on its hands and must deliver easy-to-understand policies which appear to look like robust solutions.

The big worry is that ill-considered new rules will hamstring good licensees still further while having no discernible effect on the real problems. Just like the smoking ban.