As someone who now hardly drinks alcohol, but who will never entirely give up, I am not sure what to make of proposals for minimum pricing. They seem to be hitting the wrong target, which is alcoholic drinks stronger than beer, specifically designed for immature palettes, and, yes, priced for the pocket money market, or at least the Saturday job market.
Why shouldn’t I be able to buy four bottles of real ale for six quid? It would take me over a week to get through them. But making anything last over a week because it is worth savouring is not how the adolescent mind works. And being able to appreciate anything worth savouring in that way is not how the adolescent palette works. So why discriminate in favour of the adolescent pocket?
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Another initiative from the Scottish devolution you so despise.
ReplyDeleteNo mention of the death of Jimmy Reid eh?
Bet you hated him!
I don't understand the sentimentality about a man who was certainly a supporter, and probably a paid agent, of the Soviet Union. I suppose that they can be forgiven and romanticised because they lost, though not before they had done immense harm. But on topic, please.
ReplyDeleteHe denounced the USSR long before it broke up and wrote essays about its demise.
ReplyDeleteAnyway it was the SNP that came with minimum pricing idea in the first place. Another grand idea from Edinburgh making currency in the fleshpots of London.
It's been doing the rounds since the year dot. It may have a place, but only as a secondary weapon. And note that no one in London noticed it until the local councils in Greater Manchester decided to take it up. The SNP? Puh-lease!
ReplyDeleteNow, if it had been Edinburgh or Glasgow Council, then that would have been a different matter. That, too, would have received wider attention. But not anything that comes out of Holyrood. Or anything that comes out of the SNP. Whether Holyrood will be taken more seriously once it is no longer run by the SNP, we shall soon enough see.
Deeply damaging, if sometimes very articulate, Communist and fellow-travelling trade union leaders from a certain era were not a peculiarly Scottish phenomenon, by the way. People who in those days were either middle-class students or at university specifically in order to escape from their working-class homes may sentimentalise them, not least out of a condescending admiration that Reid or Scargill, among others, could construct a sentence at all. But those who suffered as a result of their activities are often of a very different mind.
You really are a bigot.
ReplyDeleteI am a realist.
ReplyDeleteIt is not that nothing which comes of Scotland achieves wider notice. But it is that nothing does so if it comes out of Holyrood, at least while Holyrood is run by the SNP. In that context, the only exception, the Lockerbie business, looks like childish screaming for attention.
It remains to be seen what will happen once the SNP no longer does run Holyrood, i.e., once what is now that party's borrowed time runs out.