Roy Beers: Some drink rules just aren't worth the hassle

It's really the last thing the denizens of the hallowed halls of academe want to hear, while queuing up with cheap booze purchases at their local supermarket, and a student campaign to stop it happening has inevitably won the support of the SNP's main political rivals.

So on our TV screens the other day we were treated to the spectacle of assorted middle aged opposition politicians looking ridiculous while chanting: "Students are not criminals" at a rally.

Actually it's true. Students are, generally, a harmless bunch. They can't handle their drink, they make a racket and fall about, but they're more likely to be victims than perpetrators in the late night bingeing stakes.

However the political hubris prompted justice minister Kenny MacAskill to rail against the Tories, in particular, for making a fuss about students buying drink at a time when his government were reintroducing free school meals - previously axed by the self-same Conservatives.

It's fair to say, though, that the Nats have hit a wall on this one. In Scotland you can get married at 16 - but under the original proposal would have had to wait five years to buy yourself and your spouse a bottle of Champagne to celebrate the fact.

And never mind the students, what about the military? Are we really suggesting the young squaddie back safe and sound from Afghanistan can't buy a few cans of beer for himself and his mates?

A later version of the plan saw the SNP appearing to back-track, by suggesting that local licensing boards should have the power to apply an over-21 condition in their areas - if they felt like it. A patchwork solution, then.

But in fact this is the daftest proposal of the lot, since off-sales in "nice areas" would then presumably become hugely popular with thirsty 18-20 year olds from the "nasty" areas over the municipal border.

However while few outside SNP cabinet circles have any time for the idea, I'm beginning to wonder if everything is quite as it seems. Alex Salmond, easily the most able politician in Scotland, possibly Britain, seems to have stuck with this one long after it became clear it was pretty pointless. Why? Even if it were a good idea it wouldn't make that much of a difference, and wouldn't score many political points either.

Could it be - and forgive me for being suspicious of politicians - that a conspicuous off-trade measure is needed to offset other planned but still to be finalised measures certain to be thoroughly unpopular with the on trade?

That way when the on trade howls in righteous wrath about some new business-damaging wheeze the government will be able to say: "Fair's fair - look what we've done to the off trade!"

The scheme that springs immediately to mind is the threatened tartan version of England's Alcohol Disorder Zones (ADZ's), under which - as MacAskill infamously put it - "the polluter pays".

The problem with the "logic" here is that the alleged polluter is already paying very heavily in terms of licensing costs. It's also likely that ventures which cause no problems whatsoever - some of whom could make a case for being "enhancers" of social fabric, rather than polluters - could find themselves stumping up further costs purely because they find themselves in or on the periphery of a de facto late night entertainment district.

In fairness to MacAskill he did recently stress that the "overwhelming majority" of licensees are responsible, but in any case turning the governmental guns on the licensed trade because inner city bingeing is out of control no longer makes very much sense.

In Scotland's biggest city policies designed to eliminate "come in and get blitzed for

washers" offers are largely a thing of the past in clubs and bars, while the advent of SIA rules means stewarding should be both more effective and more accountable than before.

Most large city centre operators are also willing participants in, for example, the Best Bar None scheme.

Why should any operator pay what amounts to an environmental levy when planning and licensing constraints have already been satisfied, and when there are no serious complaints about the operation of the licence?

If you grant a licence knowing full well that it will attract drinkers then moan because there are late night crowd control problems, isn't it a bit like buying a flat upstairs from an Indian restaurant then complaining about the aroma?

We've been here before. The previous Labour administration railroaded through the smoking ban (described to me by one leading licensing lawyer as one of the worst pieces of draft legislation he had ever seen), immediately spawning a wave of relatively minor but thoroughly irritating unintended consequences.

As soon as the ban became law Labour councillors were railing about the wholly foreseeable street noise and litter which followed. Pubs which had literally never had a problem before suddenly found they were subject to complaints because of factors outwith their immediate control.

For months we had all the nonsense of who could and could not have an awning, an outdoor smoking area, a wall-mounted ashtray. In Paisley, near Glasgow, taxi drivers having a fag in their cabs outside the railway station were regularly nabbed by over-zealous smoke police determined to justify their existence. It was nonsense from, the start - and of course it remains nonsense now, having achieved nothing except pub closures and a steady drift of one-time pubgoers to the off trade.

But it's just part of a piece with similar thinking from municipal decision makers farther down the feeding chain. There's a trade argument which goes something like this: Glasgow licensing board shelled out licences without question for many years, then spent the next few years devising policies designed to tackle the very problems this (alleged) overprovision had created.

If licences are being run irresponsibly then there's a voluminous set of brand new licensing laws designed to bring every reasonable sanction to bear to rectify the situation.

If I own a busy but civilised bar in an area which also happens to include large nightclubs and YPV's why should I have to pay extra to fund the cost of extra policing measures?

And if 20-year-olds aren't allowed to buy drink from off-sales won't they simply head in greater numbers to on trade outlets (still offering fairly cheap prices - £1.50 is quite standard on some nights) where they're perfectly welcome from the age of 18?

You could argue that an 18 year old can be allowed to drink in a licensed regulated environment but not to take the stuff home to consume without supervision, but the under-21's simply "don't get it". It's patronising, stupid, and won't work.

Government attempts at social engineering always seem to cause more problems than they solve, as witness the ludicrous smoking legislation.

Again and again the trade pleads in vain for sophisticated solutions capable of addressing the whole picture, and just as often it is ignored in favour of quick and dirty, headline-grabbing, blunt instrument legislation.

Now the SNP, well meaning and under huge pressure to "do something" about Scotland's drink problems, are apparently hell bent on following the discredited approach adopted by the previous Labour administration.

At what point does the real culprit - the problem drunk - have to assume some responsibility?

Bars have in some cases been legislated out of existence, and we now surely have the most regulated trade in Western Europe, and yet nothing any government has done has really tackled the root problem, a deeply ingrained "British" (as in British Isles, including Ireland) culture of routine alcohol abuse.

Nobody can pretend it's an easy one to solve, but turning all the ire on the retailer is so "last century" - and just a waste of time and resources.

Just a thought, but a measure allowing police to breathalyse street drunks might be a start: over a certain limit in public (rather higher than the drink-dr