Roy Beers: Scottish minimum pricing carries a sting in the tail for pubs

The latest press release from the Scottish Government trumpeting the hoped-for benefits of minimum pricing comes up with the curiously exact figure of 70 lives that will putatively be saved in the first year, if Rab C Nesbitt and his chums are forced to fork out more for their superlager, white cider and cheap vodka.

In fact in the same press release (about a Bill to be introduced to Holyrood before the end of the year) the figure initially appears as "71 lives" before becoming the more casual "around 70 lives" a few paragraphs further down the page.

It's one of those "statistics" that leave you absent-mindedly wondering: "How do they know that?"

The SNP administration at Holyrood has been banging on about minimum pricing for so long now that this sort of rubric has come to seem very familiar indeed. It's much like the weird and wonderful figures still regularly produced to "prove" that the smoking ban has effected a seismic change in Scottish health.

I think the average Scot treats enthusiastic and unquestioning newspaper reports of this sort of survey guff much as a typical 1950's Russian would receive a Pravda summary of recent tractor production - "we know it's rubbish, but we're too polite to say so". But I don't have the stats to prove this is the case.

Of course if you aim to bring in a fairly basic and, to some, contentious measure, you have to produce some sort of estimate about what kind of effect it's likely to have in the short, medium and long term - hence the odd conclusion that with minimum pricing 70 (or 71) Scots who would otherwise drink themselves to death in a particular year will be spared.

The study is by Sheffield University, and it no doubt ticks all the right boxes where these speculative exercises are concerned - it's about interpreting selected data and using that to frame an informed prediction - but its conclusions shouldn't be confused with "real".

Nobody will ever know exactly how many lives will or will not be saved by such a measure, or even whether any lives will be saved. Or how much money the NHS won't have to spend.

What minimum pricing should really be about, surely, is helping to change the perception that drink is "as cheap as chips", in the hope that gradually - probably over a couple of generations - society in general will start to regard alcohol with slightly more respect than some of it does at present.

However, given the whole subject is controversial - just like the smoking ban - the medical fraternity, and the government, are determined to give the idea of a measurable outcome, and (just like the smoking ban) that's a completely silly proposition.

The latest reliable figures about drink damage in Scotland show things are even worse than we feared, apparently. One particularly hard-drinking area of Glasgow, Shettleston, has a death-through-drink tally around five times the UK average - and reputedly the lowest life expectancy in the EU.

Even relatively affluent areas, for example suburban East Renfrewshire, were just at or under that British average. Scotland, in terms of alcohol abuse, is incontrovertibly a disaster area.

The figures were unfurled after a parliamentary question from a Dundee MSP, who then found his own area's deaths through drink are (as he probably suspected) three times the UK average.

But when there are vested-interest groups like the supermarkets, who want to give booze away as an inducement to win generic footfall, and drink categories like the evil white "cider" aimed purely at problem drinkers, there's the inevitable temptation for government, and doctors, to make "scientific" claims about the benefits we can expect from legislation.

For example: "Total alcohol consumption across society would fall 5.4 per cent, concentrated among hazardous and harmful drinkers".

I doubt it. I think the people who drink most hazardously - the people of Shettleston (also the champions for heaviest smoking and poorest diet, of course) - will carry on regardless because the underlying problems, poverty and poor education, won't have changed a bit.

Much better, if less politically convenient, to say: "We're going to do this because it is right. Alcohol needs to be treated with respect, and this might just make a small but important difference, over several or many years."

The government can't promise us a 5.4% fall in this or a 7.3% rise in that - it can only try to give the system a little nudge in the right direction, and then hope for the best.

Meanwhile, and here's the sting, the self-same press release carries in the "notes to editors" bit at the bottom a low-key addendum about some other items to be included in the bill. A fun debate is assured.

One of these schemes is the aim to ban offsales drinks to under-21's, which is - I think it's fair to say - a wildly unpopular plan; and another is to enforce a "Social Responsibility Fee" for "some retailers". There's more, but that gives the idea.

Maybe it's just me, but I thought the whole concept of social responsibility, as enshrined by the tortuously-enacted new licensing laws, was well and truly "sorted" within the new legislation.

This appears to be yet another in a series of bolt-ons designed to wring more cash from rich-as-sin on-licensees, or "some" of them - and no doubt amid the general hoo-ha about min pricing it will quietly be added to the bill, like one of those iniquitous ten per cent "service charges" in certain restaurants.

You don't know why you're paying it - it's just "there". It will be a sort of involuntary tip to the Scottish Government from the trade.

The trade organisations will be able to register their disapproval in print, of course, but nobody - and particularly not the government - seems to listen to them, or their members, any more.