A plague on Scotland's new puritans
- Holyrood’s finger-wagging control freaks are strangling Scotland with red tape and regulation, where every aspect of our lives is subject to intrusion by the state...
Come the weekend, many a Scot likes to settle down with family and friends, enjoy a meal and pop open a bottle or two.
A fruity red number, perhaps, or a wee nip of the water of life. It’s their little indulgence after another week of working hard, wrangling children and worrying about bills.
Until relatively recently, uncorking a nice bottle of something was a socially acceptable way to spend a Saturday evening.
Now, however, the fusspots have decided we are a nation of problem drinkers and must be coerced into putting down our glasses once and for all.
Humza Yousaf's SNP are strangling Scotland with red tape
This week Holyrood voted through another hike in the minimum unit price (MUP) of alcohol. This is the price floor below which it is illegal to sell booze north of the Border.
The MUP is currently set at 50p per unit, forcing Scottish retailers to charge no less than £4.69 for a standard bottle of wine and £14 for a bottle of blended whisky.
MSPs voted to hike the MUP by 30 per cent to 65p. From September, the cheapest plonk will cost at least £6.09 while the most budget-friendly Scotch will set you back £18.20.
While they vote to make your favourite treats more costly, the political class have no need to worry about such things. MSPs earn £72,196 a year, rising to £106,185 for junior ministers and £126,452 for Cabinet ministers. They don’t need to settle for supermarket claret.
The jury is still out on whether MUP even works in tackling excess alcohol consumption. The evidence is, at best, mixed, with no definitive conclusions able to be drawn in either direction. But that is immaterial to the latter-day prohibitionists. They want to control people’s choices and MUP lets them.
Control is the overriding ambition of those who govern us. Scotland has become a testing ground for illiberalism, a laboratory piloting every ban, regulation and legislative encumbrance imaginable. Everywhere you look, a fresh blast of authoritarian prohibitionism is thundering through the air.
The SNP has never been a party terribly attached to liberty. It wants freedom for Scotland, just not freedom in Scotland. But in recent years, the Nationalists have become more proscriptive, especially since teaming up with the Scottish Greens.
Barely a day goes by without something else being prohibited. They’ve banned wood-burning stoves and are banning gas boilers. They’ve outlawed cheap booze and opening a tin on a train. They’ve proscribed the display of tobacco products and they’re coming for your disposable vapes.
You can’t park your car on the pavement or drive it in city centres. They plan to stop you buying new diesel or petrol vehicles altogether.
A battery of legislation has come raining down on individuals and businesses, much of it random where it is not downright bizarre.
The Scottish Government has criminalised the supply or possession of plastic balloon sticks. It has made it an offence to ‘manufacture plastic stemmed cotton buds’ or sell them to the public. The latter is provided for under the Environmental Protection (Cotton Buds) (Scotland) Regulations 2019, which is somehow a real thing and not a plotline from The Thick Of It.
It doesn’t stop there. Scotland has outlawed the burning of waste containing plastic on a farm or croft. It is prohibited to ‘remove wild kelp from the seabed’ under the Scottish Crown Estate Act 2019. The Conservation of Salmon (Scotland) Regulations 2016 forbid any person to ‘retain any salmon caught in any coastal waters in a salmon fishery district’ except ‘within, and in the course of the operation of, a fish farm’.
Under the Wild Animals in Travelling Circuses (Scotland) Act 2018, it is an offence to ‘use, or cause or permit another person to use, a wild animal in a travelling circus’.
A new law makes it a crime to use, supply or possess a glue trap for the purposes of snaring a rodent. So you had better make sure you don’t go rat-catching with intent.
All of these pale against Holyrood’s most heroic stand for animal rights, the Fur Farming (Prohibition) Act. So keen were MSPs to protect the humble mink from exploitation, when they took this 2002 legislation through the Scottish parliament, they neglected to notice that there were no fur farms in Scotland, the last one having shut down a decade earlier.
They have clamped down on fracking and nuclear power, genetically modified crops and biodegradable landfill waste.
MSPs recently agreed to increase minimum pricing starting in September
The SNP's new Hate Crime law has been heavily criticised
Freedom of expression has been restricted by the Hate Crime Act. Forthcoming bans include praying across the street from an abortion clinic or attempting to talk your child out of a gender change.
Abandoned prohibitions included legislation making it a criminal offence to sing unspecified songs at football matches and proposals to crackdown on fishing in Scottish coastal waters.
And of course during the Covid-19 pandemic, almost everything under the sun had a big red line drawn through it. Mixing indoors with other households. Standing closer than two metres to another person. Attending public worship. Playing background music in a pub. Using public transport without a mask. Going on holiday. Leaving your home one too many times a day.
The pandemic may have been a trial for you but the political class were living their best life.
The past few years have been a high-water mark for nannying, but don’t expect them to rest on their laurels. They are always looking for new ways to impose their preferences on the general public. From every sinew of government, every pore of the public sector, there chugs a toxic fug of nanny-knows-best certainty.
An entire army of middle-class finger-waggers employed at your expense to scold you into compliance. They are to be found in quangos and on commissions, in every facet of the NHS, and in distant recesses of the state you have never even heard of. Cajoling the plebs into being nicer, healthier and more climate-sustaining is not an afterthought. It is the substance of the jobs these people do.
The idea of simply leaving people alone would never occur to this taxpayer-funded bully brigade. They are seized by the fear that somewhere, right this very second, an adult is making a decision for themselves that hasn’t been planned, researched, prescribed and legislated by Big Brother.
They truly believe that we aren’t smart or sophisticated enough to direct our own lives and can only achieve our potential through the guiding hand of credentialed officialdom. These people are a bureaucracy with a God complex.
Every aspect of our lives is being micromanaged, and micromanaged to be more bland, joyless and virtuous. Life has to be that little bit less pleasurable because our new ruling class regards pleasure as suspect and takes every opportunity to squelch it. The masses must be made to conform with the lifestyle preferences of their betters. It’s like being governed by the human resources department of Greenpeace.
Don’t do that. Don’t say that. Don’t even think it.
That’s bad for you. That’s problematic. That’s not what the experts say.
Do you really need that second glass of wine? Don’t you think you should be using a heat pump? Are you sure you have put your cardboard in the correct bin?
At least the moralisers of old were trying to save your soul. Today’s progressive puritans are trying to suck the soul out of you.
And no wonder, considering how fantastically glum they all are, their every waking hour spent hyperventilating about climate change and Elon Musk and people telling jokes on the internet.
If you don’t believe me, take a glance across the SNP frontbench at Holyrood. As sullen and mirthless a parade as you are likely to encounter. You start out with Angus Robertson, make your way past Shona Robison and Humza Yousaf, and end up at Shirley-Anne Somerville. They’ve all got shared custody of the same facial expression: resting funeral director face.
Mind you, they are shiny, happy people compared to their coalition partners. You can try to explain the Scottish Greens politically, but it won’t get you very far. The sign above the door says environmentalism, the sales patter is all independence, but the shelves are lined with every conceivable brand of gender theory.
Scotland's Low Emission Zone's have been a contentious issue for drivers
What truly animates the Greens is a deep-seated gloominess about human beings and the impact they have on the environment. They are all so earnest and miserable and vegan.
This is not just a personal quality. It informs their worldview. The Greens are a receptacle for modish, middle-class self-hatred, appealing to the sort of arts-graduate hypochondriac who thinks the planet is dangerously overpopulated and stricter control of human activity is essential to save the ecosystem.
A party of extremes, the Greens have no concept of middle ground. Pluck a policy issue at random and the Greens will either want to ban it or make it compulsory.
What drives the political class to pursue the immiseration of the public at large? As with all the worst ideas, it’s fashionable. The reigning dogma among politicians and policymakers regards the masses as selfish, stupid, irresponsible and in need of the firm hand of social engineering. Their vices must be suppressed, their choices reduced and their behaviour improved.
The governing class harbours deep suspicions about those they govern. All politics is ultimately about class and progressive puritanism is no different. It is about imposing the enlightened prescriptions of the educated classes on the great unwashed.
They worry that the lower orders are getting ideas above their station and so devise policy to keep them in their place. That is true of minimum pricing, smoking bans, restrictions on speech and countless other petty rules and regulations. These are mechanisms by which the right sort of people can exert control over the wrong sort of people.
There is an alternative to this gloomy state of affairs. Simply put: leave people alone. Stop taking away their liberties. Stop making life harder for them. Stop making it more financially burdensome for them to enjoy themselves. Just let them be. Free to make their own decisions. Free to make their own mistakes.
There is no reason why the state should dictate the price of a bottle of Merlot. That is a matter for the market. Let retailers charge according to supply and demand and let customers decide whether to pay or take their business elsewhere.
Adults are more than capable of knowing their limits and there is a plethora of advice and guidance out there about alcohol units and responsible drinking.
Where people struggle with misuse or dependence, there are services in place to support them and get them the help they need. There is no need to infantilise the whole adult population to address a medical problem faced by some.
There is no reason for the state to be doing a lot of what it does. Fed up seeing single-use vapes discarded in parks and on streets? Enforce laws against littering. Don’t ban an entire line of products in one fell swoop. (Also don’t pretend that littering is the reason for the ban when everyone knows this is a backdoor trial for a wider ban on vaping.)
Worried about the impact on the environment of petrol and diesel emissions? Trade in your fossil-fuelled car for an electric vehicle. Better yet, switch to public transport. Do your part to reduce emissions. But don’t use the law to browbeat others into joining you. Motorists will come over to electric cars when they are good and ready, and when those products are more affordable.
And if our elected representatives – and unelected officials – are looking for ways to occupy themselves, they might focus on closing the attainment gap, reducing hospital waiting times, tackling drugs deaths, growing the economy and upgrading our crumbling infrastructure.
These are all priorities of a much higher order for the ordinary Scot than how much people drink, what kind of car they drive or what objectionable views they might express in their own homes.
Of course, facing up to these problems means confronting the fact that very little progress has been made on them in the past quarter-century. Handed a parliament, a government, and a vast bureaucracy, Scotland’s political class has delivered outcomes that would shame a parish council. In place of transformational policies that strike at the root of this dysfunction, we get progressive puritanism and its sundry impositions on everyday life.
The result is a country that is less free and less at ease with itself. A country that has been lectured and hectored and scolded into submission.
