Letters: Minimum pricing is a hopeless policy

What seems to be getting ignored is that, while the Nationalist government preaches the benefits of this on the National Health Service, it is ignoring the aspect of social justice. Young people throughout Scotland are finding themselves confined to the dole and a life of poverty and social exclusion.

The Scottish Government is failing youth today just as Margaret Thatcher failed them in the 1980s.

Tragically, it is not offering any hope despite guarantees of apprenticeships, training and college places.

Thousands of young people, many from the most deprived areas of Scotland, will resort to drinking more than is healthy for them, to reduce the effects of boredom and the feeling of being neglected by society.

As the price of alcohol increases, they will turn to other forms of oblivion-enhancing substances, all of which will fuel the bank accounts of organised crime.

Michael Donaldson

West Avenue

Plains, Airdrie

Outrage does not start to describe what I and millions of others feel about the SNP government’s policy on minimum unit pricing for alcohol. Yes, there is a group of people who drink themselves to a standstill on a Saturday night, but the people that we see, on television, staggering out of a club or pub are well able to afford any additional cost of their booze.

As for youngsters drinking cheap, high alcohol- value drinks, they will just pay more and get the cash, by committing more crime, so not only will the health bill not go down but the bills for the criminal system will rise.

Anyway, what about the millions of people, like me, who buy a cheap bottle of wine from Tesco or the village shop for £3.20?

I will have to pay £4.50 for the same wine or, for the same price, buy a better wine for my £4.50 even though I am perfectly content with my usual, formerly cut-price wine. And why should Scots pay a minimum of 50p a unit, when the English propose only 40p.

Is this what independence is all about: an SNP government taking more money from drinkers than a Westminster government to show it cares more?

Surely the limited research shows one price or the other is right? I hope the drinks companies will fight this proposal tooth and nail, through every court in the land.

Kenneth G Ferguson (OBE)

Stoneyburn

Edinburgh

Nicola Sturgeon takes the opportunity of a hospital visit to make her rather priggish commitment to minimum pricing of alcoholic drinks as a means of tackling “Scotland’s unhealthy relationship with alcohol”.

What she does not appear to have grasped is that there already is, and has been since time immemorial, minimum pricing of alcoholic drinks in the UK, in the shape of rapacious excise duties levied by successive governments – as much as 60 or 70 per cent of the price of a bottle of Scotch is tax. Why has this form of excessive minimum pricing not had the effect she seeks?

The fact is, as she probably knows full well but it does not suit her to admit, that pricing has nothing to with the problems of excessive drinking.

Those who get it wrong will continue to do so, whatever the price. It is far more a question of culture, education and example.

In France, where I live, there is no policy of excessive taxation, nor of minimum pricing, and both public and private drunkenness are rare.

The French drink something like twice as much per capita as the British, but they don’t booze.

It is simply unacceptable behaviour and seriously frowned upon here in France to drink too much. Children learn that at an early age in the home, and the habit of taking it easy sticks with them into adulthood.

Anthony Tucker

Les Garennes

Trémons, France

You report that health “experts” say minimum alcohol pricing “will save 500 lives” and that the legislation will lead to 3,500 fewer crimes, thereby saving the NHS and criminal justice system £64 million in the first year of the new legislation’s implementation.

These are blatantly bogus statistics of the type which so-called “experts” regularly invent to justify decisions on this, and other barmy bureaucratic nannying.

DJ Hollingdale

Easter Park Drive

Edinburgh