F2C Scotland letter on minimum pricing, Edinburgh Evening News

Letter to Evening News from Michael Davidson, Freedom to Choose (Scotland)'s new chairman:

THE Scottish Government’s plan to bring in minimum pricing for alcohol will bring no benefits to society in general. 

There is no empirical evidence to suggest that it will make any difference to problem drinking – those who drink to a degree where they harm themselves, their families and society will continue to do so, just as they always have. 

Responsible drinkers among the poorest of society will suffer. The only beneficiaries of this government-imposed cartelism will be alcohol sellers and control-obsessed politicians.This is another prohibitionist move, following the smoking ban in pubs and other anti-tobacco measures, to wrest our autonomy from all of us. 

The job of politicians is to represent people, not to manage them.

Michael Davidson, Chairman, Freedom to Choose (Scotland), Edinburgh

The Guardian reports that minimum pricing was opposed by Scottish Labour, but following the SNP's decision to impose a 'health levy' on supermarkets (which will claw back the increased margins from alcohol sold in shops) they are likely to support it. The drinks industry believes that setting a minimum price for drink will be illegal in European law, even though most major parties now seem to be in favour.

Times are bad when European law seems the best hope we have of stopping this policy.

Cider at 51p a can, 2004: supermarket prices didn't kill pubs

Thanks to Dave Atherton for this one. The Guardian (2004) reports concerns about supermarkets selling at much lower prices than pubs at a time when it was planned to regulate drink pricing in pubs and clubs.

This gives the lie to the notion that supermarket prices are killing pubs. Supermarket prices were known to be a factor before the smoking ban was voted in. Also, the Scottish Government account suggests that prices have been a factor over a longer term, rather than just since the smoking ban.

But the increasing affordability of alcohol is not uniform across sectors. While on-sales ( e.g. pubs) prices have generally increased above the Retail Price Index ( RPI) over the last 20 years, off-sales ( e.g. shops and supermarkets) prices have remained more static and below RPI. [para 25]

Supermarket prices cannot explain the rapid deterioration in pub fortunes that followed the implementation of smoking bans.

Knowledge of this threat to the pub sector didn't do much to prevent the legislation being approved in Parliament (or Holyrood). It is hard to understand how licensees and their representative organisations were been led to believe that their fortunes would be improved by the smoking ban, knowing that off-sales were already undercutting them

Licensees are quitting, not smokers, says SLTA

Today Paul Waterson has bid for another look at the smoking ban.  He begins:

Five years ago our pubs were generally full of life, had a great atmosphere and were just about holding their own against vicious price competition from the supermarkets.

A promising start. We knew that the supermarket prices had always been a problem, but it was a problem that broke the surface only when the smoking ban had sent away a good number of traditional pub customers.

Mr Waterson's piece goes on to explain how the smoking ban as enacted in Scotland has failed to catch on in Europe, pointing out that the better the weather, the laxer the enforcement tends to be. In terms of trade, bars are closing at four times the rate that they closed before the smoking ban came in. The losses have amounted, he says, to one-eighth of Scotland's pubs.

Comparing this to the smoking cessation rate in Scotland is an interesting move. Although the ban was not introduced (ostensibly) to prevent people from smoking, it's clear that the alleged damage from secondary smoke won't decline in the long term unless the smoking rate declines as well. And Mr Waterson has good reason to draw attention to the poor long-term success rate of smoking cessation interventions by the NHS. The latest official report (summary here) gives this paragraph:

Quit outcomes based on client follow-up at 12 months after the quit date use data for the 2009 calendar year (12 month outcomes for the full 2010 calendar year are not yet available). Based on data for 2009, the quit rate at 12 months was 7% with 68% of cases 'lost to follow-up'/smoking status unknown by this stage. 

A 7 per cent quit rate at 12 months (that's 7 per cent of the 7.4 per cent of smokers that even tried to give up)  seems rather bleak from where I am sitting. Sheila Duffy does her best to sound optimistic but this is all she can manage:

While giving up smoking can be difficult for some, it is encouraging to see that at least 39% of those who attended stop smoking services in 2010 remained quit a month later. [emphasis added] 

Surely anyone wanting to give up would like a fair idea of their chances after the first few weeks of intensive support. Failure to give any information after four weeks doesn't look promising. A rough ballpark figure suggests that from one year to the next, 93 per cent of the smoking population carries on smoking, plus 92 per cent of the remaining 7 per cent who have tried to quit, plus any youngsters who have taken up the habit and minus any smokers who have died. It gives Paul Waterson good grounds for saying that the impact of the smoking ban has been far greater on licensees and their establishments than it has on the smoking rate.

Mr Waterson speaks of moderate amendments, the old days having gone forever, and so on. Whatever. As long as government dominates the discussion of what should be allowed the trade will need to grow teeth before it will make any impact – if my reading of the current Scottish Government's agenda is accurate. Begging the government to increase drinks prices to ridiculous heights will not help the drinks industry and will not help the licensed trade either. To quote at second hand from here:

The hospitality industry lobbies for more restrictions on supermarket-bought alcohol to boost sales in bars; small brewers push for more punitive tax rates on big brewers... the only winners are the healthists who get support bit by bit for more regulations on everything. It's like a bunch of folks on the scaffolds complaining that the other guy's noose isn't quite tight enough. Y'all might instead direct your attention to the hangman sometime and try helping each other cut those ropes.

Things could get more ridiculous yet, as some health expert (not in Scotland thankfully) has said the drinking age should be raised to 24. Raising any legal purchasing age so far beyond the age of majority would not, I suspect, go down well with young people in this country. But some people will enjoy flying this kind of kite.

The licensed trade and its associates and rivals need to consider their strategy very carefully. But it's good to see that the smoking ban is at last getting some of the attention it deserves.

Work together, says Scottish Coalition on Tobacco

Work together to improve tobacco control in Scotland. This is the message of Sheila Duffy, speaking as Chair of the Scottish Coalition On Tobacco, which includes the following organisations:

ASH Scotland, British Heart Foundation Scotland, British Lung Foundation Scotland, British Medical Association, Cancer Research UK, Chest Heart & Stroke Scotland, Macmillan Cancer Support, Royal College of Nursing, The Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation, Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, Royal College of Psychiatrists, The Stroke Association, and the Royal Environmental Health Institute of Scotland.

And furthermore:

The coalition provides a platform to share view with other organisations and with policy makers as it works closely with the Scottish Government, NHS Health Scotland, and the Scottish Parliament's Cross Party Group on Tobacco Control. Its collective approach means that SCOT has become an influential and respected voice in public health, with the secretariat being provided by ASH Scotland, the leading charity campaigning for effective tobacco control in Scotland.

 These people have got cooperation off to a fine art. On the issue of tobacco control they have succeeded in pushing legislation through Holyrood with eye-watering majorities (both the tobacco display ban and the smoking ban itself were opposed by fewer than twenty MSPs each).

Perhaps they have succeeded in convincing enough of the public that something must be done about Scottish health, whether under-age smoking, drinking, anti-social behaviour. But it doesn't stop at something, either with tobacco or alcohol. Australia has graduated to a general state of threatening to stop people from smoking in their own homes. Meanwhile Alcohol Focus Scotland, following the strategy of ASH Scotland, excludes the drinks industry from alcohol policy discussions.

It's disappointing that the licensed trade can't find its way to cooperating as effectively as the alliance that's fighting it. Disappointing but not surprising, because the alliance of professional associations and well-heeled charities is naturally in a far stronger bargaining position than those in the market place whose survival depends on sympathetic policies.

The picture illustrating 'Level the playing field' aptly shows the slope in the playing field sloping sideways and not offering advantage to pubs, clubs or supermarkets. Yet the Scottish Licensed Trade Association's campaign of the same name seeks to remove any advantages of clubs in relation to licensing laws, and the ability of supermarkets to sell cheap booze.
The difficulties faced by licensed premises of all kinds relate to official attitudes and policies relating to drink, the beer tie, drink and driving and all manner of other issues. The smoking ban, however, has allowed official policy to dictate the pub's customer base, and interfered terribly with what happens in private clubs. It's hard to see anything more fundamental to the success and confidence of the pubs and clubs as autonomous institutions welcoming whoever came through the door.

Pubs, supermarkets and clubs used to serve different markets. The smoking ban has done much to increase direct competition between pubs and supermarkets for the same market – most pubs can't offer nearly the same advantages in terms of social experience to their erstwhile customer base, the smokers, nor can they compete with supermarkets on price. This has made pubs feel more keenly any apparent preferential treatment that clubs get in their licensing arrangements.

Unlike those worthies (above) who find it relatively easy to cooperate with each other to further the honourable agenda of denormalising smoking, drinking and who knows what next, the traders in the market place are still treating each other (publicly at any rate) as their biggest threat. Of course there are issues but surely if nothing else they could unite to fight the powers that unite to stop them trading effectively.

They're doing it in Spain.

Can we blame the smoking ban for pub closures?

Can we? Or is it the general decline of the licensed trade, supermarket prices and all those things that anti-smokers love to blame, forgetting how many recessions pubs have survived in the past?

Two recent papers are pointing firmly toward the smoking ban, pointing out that there have always been underlying problems but the sudden fall in demand in many establishments from their core customers has been an added shock that accounted for the great escalation in pub closures over the last three years.

Paper 1 Smoking Gun, is a research paper carried out by CR Consulting for the Save our Pubs and Clubs Campaign.
Paper 2 is a research paper by David Atherton of Freedom2Choose (UK) for the Institute of Economic Affairs.

Campaigners south of the border are still pushing hard for an amendment, on the basis of economic damage. Of course they are right, the damage to pubs, publicans and their families has been devastating. But even if I were proved wrong about the economic consequences, the ban itself is objectionable on so many other grounds that I would still be opposed to it.

Link to Taking Liberties for action on UK ban.

Edit: it seems that would-be reformers have an uphill task in their attempts to amend the ban.