Minimum alcohol pricing will just make things worse

Tuesday March 29, 2011

Britain may have a problem with excessive drinking but Tom Miers believes that calls for government to push up the price of alcoholic drinks are unjust and will help to infantilise society

Thank goodness the Scottish Parliament somehow managed to reject the idea of minimum alcohol pricing in November. The decision was largely by way of a raspberry to the SNP administration, but none the worse for that. For in Scotland, that petri dish of illiberalism, the pressure is always on for more and greater interference in the way people run their lives.

This time it comes from the outgoing Lord Advocate, Elish Angiolini, who said this week that Scotland faces an ‘apocalypse’ of crime unless the country gets to grips with its booze problem. She went on to say that pricing was a factor in alcohol consumption, implying that government action to raise prices would help deal with the problem, especially of youth drinking.

Now, no-one disputes that there is an issue with drunken youth in Scotland, as in the rest of the UK. Nor can we deny that price is a factor in consumption. Of course it is. If the cost of something goes up, then generally speaking people can afford less of it. But put these two together and you get a nonsense.

Follow the logic of using price to control an indulgence like alcohol, and you eventually arrive at prohibition. Why not simply ban the stuff, and then, presumably, alcohol-fuelled crime would disappear. The same arguments apply to minimum pricing.

Firstly, you have a problem of justice. Intervention like this punishes everyone for the crimes of a few. Even in Scotland, most people consume alcohol responsibly most of the time, so punishing them with higher prices is unjust.

Secondly, there is a problem of unintended consequences. Pushing up the price of drink encourages smuggling and bootlegging, and the nasty criminality that accompanies both. It is also damaging to local business and the economy as a whole as people shop abroad. Push the minimum price of alcohol too high, and you’ll start to damage the already beleaguered pub, further undermining the important social glue of communal socialising.

This brings us to an even more serious point about how we want society to develop. If the answer to every problem is for government to ban or restrict activity how can we expect individuals to adopt a responsible attitude to anything?

One of the striking features of post Soviet Russia was how much difficulty the populace had in adapting to the choices and responsibility of economic freedom. One aspect of this is the ongoing and very serious problem Russia has with alcohol consumption. The two are surely connected. If the state controls everything in society, not only do individuals lose some of their capacity for self-control, but the natural and voluntary structures that should flourish in a free society to provide moral and lifestyle guidance break down too.

In Britain the state plays a big role in society that to some extent replicates and replaces institutions like the family, community, churches, charities and self-help organisations. Low level ‘anti social’ behaviour, often fuelled by excessive drinking, is a product of the breakdown of the kind of customary social structures that used to restrain the excesses of the young, or anyone else for that matter.

Banning alcohol would further infantilise society by removing an important choice in life from adults. In the long run, therefore, such a ban or restriction is counterproductive, because it reduces responsibility.

The Lord Advocate drew a link between the liberalisation of opening times and the rise in anti-social binge drinking. She claimed that the attempt to move towards a more mellow, continental style café culture had failed. If this is the case (and I suspect the link has more than an element of coincidence about it), then the proper response is to wonder why some young Britons cannot drink responsibly in public, rather than to try to criminalise them.

Britain does have a problem with excessive drinking, particularly when this is associated with violent or obnoxious behaviour. But the answer for government must not be to restrict the freedoms of individual citizens, but to take a long hard look at the damage done to social structures by its own intervention over the years, and try to correct them.

Tom Miers is editor of the Free Society