Roy Beers: The war on fags is over - the war on food is about to begin

This week saw the launch of just such an "initiative" in the country which brought you the smoking ban, Highland country dancing, golf, and many other bizarre laws and practices too distressing to list in detail.

And yet, on reflection, it was all so predictable. There was the war on fags, of course, which memorably led to smoking rates in Ireland, the country which "inspired" a blanket ban in Scotland, actually going up - there's gratitude for you.

Then we've the phoney war on drink, in which government spends huge amounts of time devising ever more difficult hoops for publicans to jump through while allowing loss-leading supermarkets to do almost anything they like.

But this latest one, pun intended, takes the biscuit. In a bid to cure Scotland's rocketing levels of obesity - a majority of the population is now overweight and a third of children are officially fat - the SNP administration in charge of the Scottish Parliament has come up with a scheme which is positively Maoist in its approach.

Retailers - and that inevitably means pubs and restaurants - are to be hectored into serving slimmed-down portions to their greedy customers, and could even be forced to display allegedly "healthy" food options on their menus. Any trader failing to observe the regime's diktats will be shot - sorry, reluctantly dealt with by due legal process.

But at the same time there will be no nanny-stating of the public, who must not be made to feel inferior or self-conscious about their indiscriminately ravenous ways and ever-expanding waistlines. On no account must it be implied that they are a bunch of greedy layabouts addicted to junk food.

No, it is implicit that they are innocent victims, seduced by irresponsible catering operators into reckless eating habits. Which of us has not succumbed to the fatal allure of a pavement blackboard bearing the legend "Burger and pint: £6"?

The entire weight of this new legislative lunacy will be directed straight at the retailer, who from now on can be expected to be told what, and how much of it, he or she can sell you or me.

Just the other week I was moaning about how the impasse over minimum pricing has reintroduced, if it ever went away, the concept of candyfloss, gesture politics.

But unfortunately I was understating the case. This time - having exhausted themselves in making an utter farce of the Licensing Act and heaping untold expense and misery on licensees - McGovernment has decided it's time to physically control what the public eats.

The plan reportedly doesn't cut the mustard with the National Obesity Forum, who complain - with no sense of irony - that it's a case of too little, too late.

Actually the food-rationing scheme will, at least initially, be "voluntary", but with the threat of legal sanction if this approach is perceived to be not working.

Freely translated, this means "We'll pretend it's voluntary for the time being, then once you're all involved we'll say it isn't working and make it the law."

That is exactly what happened with the previous (Labour) government and the fag ban.

The idea of controlling or at least heavily influencing dietary habits isn't new. A few years ago I was lucky enough to have a conversation with Dr Mac Armstrong, who was at that time Scotland's chief medical officer.

The subject was the looming smoking ban, but on further questioning he cheerfully admitted he would like to control pub and restaurant menus too - perhaps by forcing traders to include notional "healthy options" on menus.

Our unsophisticated local press, ever bored by detail, promptly rewrote this academic line of thinking as a threatened Pie Ban - the tabloids also featured pictures of the notionally under-threat pies, so that you were in no doubt - but the whole subject slipped beneath the radar as the excitement of the Smokes Ban took over.

Now that all but a tiny handful of the fag ban's most ardent critics have been bored into submission by endless discussion of that particularly futile piece of legislation it's time to sound the alert again, because McGovernment has its eyes set on nothing less than a legislative "world first".

And that, sadly, is the clue. Plans which might actually work but gain little attention are not favoured by government, of any colour, because policies - in today's Scotland, and no doubt elsewhere - are invented simultaneously to create and to answer headlines.

Headlines (whether newspaper, TV, etc) tell us we're staring a ticking obesity timebomb in its fat face, and that only radical action will do. No calories will be lost, or prizes gained, by doing nothing. It seems all the people putatively saved by the smoking ban have become gluttons, and will end up in hospital anyway.

Quotes from the restaurant trade in Scotland suggest licensees consider McGovernment to be stark, staring mad. I agree with them.

While yet another tier of quasi-police scour the land for licensees intent on serving oversize portions of chips the bulk of the population will be waddling around the aisles of Tesco, Iceland, Farmfoods, etc, stuffing their trolleys with hideous family size pizzas and super-calorific cakes groaning with sugar - although supermarkets will have to cut portion sizes too.

The Holyrood administration isn't completely daft. It accepts that people should be free to eat what they like - or at any rate that it can't stop them - but argues that by forcing restaurants (etc) to serve smaller portions there will be a gradual "perception" that modest-sized is right.

Note how casually the trade has been co-opted - again - into the unpaid role of perception-shifter in the government's Orwellian little plan. The trade rolled over to the smoking ban, you see, so there won't be any problem.

McGovernment is aware that in today's tapas-strewn dining culture some people will consume two or three starters and skip a main dish; and indeed that the simple answer to a very small portion of something (anything) is to order two.

But the rot has started - the juggernaut of idiocy, with its commissions, surveys, consultations and pointless seminars in plush hotels, has begun to roll.

It was the since-ousted Labour regime of Jack McConnell which foisted the stupid smoking ban on the nation's pubs, and the zealots of ASH who assured us this was a magnificent chance for bars to "grasp the opportunity" and develop food trade.

Now that almost every bar does have a food offer the aim of McConnell's SNP successors is to control that too. And this from a party led by Alex Salmond, an arguably slightly overweight but nonetheless perfectly standard-issue middle-aged Scot who likes a bit of a curry.

It's not his fault that some of his more zealous acolytes have cooked up a policy which risks making him look a little like a blokey version of that dietician in Little Britain.

Nevertheless pubs, the favourite target of government's amateur attempts at social engineering, are in the main frame again.

Maybe, just maybe, this time around publicans will answer the latest gesture politics with a suitably Churchillian gesture of their own.