Roy Beers: SNP isolated over minimum pricing

Press releases from aggrieved Nat MSPs continue to argue that with the whole of the medical profession as well as the police and the Scottish Licensed Trade Association on their side the opposition parties should see the light of day and let them deliver a seismic new policy - one with major UK-wide implications.

But the unionist parties are not having it. Labour argue min pricing would actually be a gift to supermarkets and producers, giving them major profits.

The Tories are more worried about government interfering with free choice, and say it's a blunt instrument that won't solve the problem.

There's also the usual legal hall-of-mirrors about whether or not min pricing is lawful.

Either way it's stymied, and while all sides continue to argue it's essential to "do something" - about those doom-laden newspaper headlines which regularly tell us Scotland is drinking itself to death - until this week the whole debate appeared to be stuck fast in entrenched positions on party lines.

Now Labour, forced to come up with some ideas of their own, have decided to launch "a Commission" to analyse what to do.

This exercise, headed by a professor, has already come up with some sporadic and somewhat arcane proposals, for example a ban on alcoholic drink with a high caffeine content.

The idea seems to have been inspired by recent news reports suggesting it's the caffeine hit in controversial fortified wine brand Buckfast that sends hooligans crazy - although perhaps only if they drink the stuff by the pint.

As usual no thought appears to have been given to how you'd go about banning a drink which only causes problems when sold to socio-economic group D men in central Scotland. The drink has become associated with violent and thuggish behaviour, goes the logic, and so must be banned.

And as is customary this idea will ultimately hit the cutting room floor when its inherent daftness becomes manifest.

But it's a measure of the desperate position the politicians now find themselves in over alcohol abuse and what to do about it.

Min pricing was never advertised as a total solution anyway, just one element in a wider attempt to change today's binge-friendly retail climate.

However its political critics appear pretty unconvincing in their efforts to come up with anything better.

Labour's rapidly-deployed think tank/Commission has also suggested making a Challenge 25 off sales regime mandatory under law - but couldn't the same logic one day be applied to pubs?

The Tories are no more coherent, with more vague noises about banning drinks, or drink categories, which the newspapers say are causing trouble. Even if such an

idea were credible it would have zero to do with the Scottish Parliament, and would be entirely Westminster's responsibility - so why discuss it in Edinburgh?

Mysteriously, 'though, Labour health spokeswoman Jackie Baillie MSP has said any "alternative pricing mechanism" - but not SNP min pricing, of course - must deliver cash which can be used for "extra police offers and alcohol treatment."

As ideas go, these assorted wheezes hardly merit the word "embryo", and that in a country where every politician and all the doctors regularly tell us something fairly radical has to be done.

Like so many matters in Scotland's parliament, where the government rule by just one seat, there will be plenty of horse-trading among parties to determine final policy.

As an idea of the sort of low-key deals which take place the SNP government has just got its budget passed by parliament in exchange, among other things, for acceding to Labour's demand for a grant-aided scrappage scheme for old boilers (four hundred quid old for new).

The big fear has to be that what finally emerges from this latest going-nowhere alcohol debate will reflect political exigency and tabloid concerns rather than any practical merit.

For example the silly idea of a Buckfast ban misses the point that misuse of this drink is part of an ASBO problem largely confined to young, poorly educated males, whereas the real national dilemma - how to stop people of various ages and backgrounds drinking at health-crippling levels - still hasn't been addressed.

Until the smoking ban and the long drawn-out hassle over the new Licensing Act most publicans I've spoken to were fairly sanguine about government policies - they might complain, but never very bitterly.

However now, as with the eccentric decision to proscribe fag machines (although good riddance to them), there's an awareness that just about anything is theoretically possible where health issues are concerned.

Few in parliament appear bothered by the havoc caused by smoking and licensing legislation over the last four years - we're on to the next sketch.

Min pricing might or might not be a good idea, but now that it has stalled we seem to be back in the territory of Christmas-cracker, ten-a-penny, policies on the hoof.