Scotland has levied a new tax on the poor. Last week, it introduced minimum alcohol pricing, making it an offense to sell liquor for less than 50 pence (70 cents) a unit.
American friends are often surprised by how hectoring and statist the Scottish government is. Scotland, in their minds, is a hardy, rugged place — hardier, certainly, than its effete southern neighbor. It can come as quite a shock to learn Scottish separatists now define their national character as being all about big government — or, as they prefer to put it, “fairness.”
Forget the image of a woad-painted Mel Gibson screaming “freeeeedom!” If you want a more apt cinematic picture, think of Ewan MacGregor’s lament in Trainspotting, as he sits in the Highlands swigging a bottle of vodka: “It’s shite being Scottish!”
Now it’s true that many people of Scottish descent — including, I’m afraid, this columnist — drink more than is good for them. No other country would have invented the “hauf an’ a hauf”, a mixture of beer and whiskey, guaranteed to set the room spinning within minutes. But whiskey won’t be affected by this law. It is aimed, rather, at the booze that people on low incomes drink — notably high-strength ciders and lagers.
There’s a curious streak of snobbery in the Scottish National Party (SNP) that pushed through this levy. I say “curious” because the party likes to think of itself as the voice of working-class Scots: miners and steelworkers and crofters standing up against anglicized landlords. But although it idolizes these groups in the abstract, it disapproves of their lifestyles in practice.
When SNP lawmakers talk about “junk food”, they don’t mean duck à l’orange or a decent bottle of Meursault. They mean KFC and Doritos and other poor people’s grub. Scotland’s indigenous rival to Coca-Cola, a bright orange concoction called Irn-Bru, has reduced its sugar content to avoid a tax that had been levied not on sugar in general, but on sodas in particular. Poor people’s drinks, you see.
Nor does the Edinburgh government’s authoritarianism stop at food. Scotland is moving toward a ban on smoking even on your own property. It has outlawed smoking in parks, and in cars when kids are present, and now plans to extend its ban to anyone standing within 15 meters of a hospital, and even to require people not to smoke in their own homes when a social worker visits. It has criminalized spanking children, and raised the age for buying e-cigarettes to 18 (while simultaneously demanding that the voting age be lowered to 16). It has even decreed that every child in Scotland should have a state-appointed guardian until the age of 18, a “Named Person.”
I wrote here recently about how a Scotsman had been convicted for, in effect, making a bad joke, having trained his girlfriend’s pug to annoy her by raising its arm in a Nazi salute whenever he said “Heil Hitler.” That, though, is not the limit of the SNP’s ambition to circumscribe expression.
The party also passed the “Offensive Behavior at Football Act”, designed to prohibit sectarian displays at Celtic-Rangers matches in Glasgow. That city had imported some of the iconography of the religious quarrel in Northern Ireland — although, mercifully, not the accompanying political violence. Rival fans still occasionally sing insulting songs at each other, Rangers supporters being rude about the Pope while Celtic supporters are rude about the Queen.
Yet, because the legislation was designed to target any behavior which might be deemed offensive, it could also cover a Rangers fan singing the national anthem or a Celtic fan crossing himself ostentatiously. These absurdities led to the law’s repeal a few weeks ago, albeit against furious protests from some SNP legislators.
How did Adam Smith’s homeland come to elect the most intrusive and nannying government in Europe? Well, the SNP arose in opposition to Margaret Thatcher, whom it blamed for the closure of Scotland’s heavy industries. From that time it tended to define Scottish identity in essentially Leftist terms. Leftist, these days, means telling people what’s good for them on even the most micro level.
There is little evidence, though, that SNP authoritarianism has much popular appeal. Sure, Scots resented Thatcherism, but that doesn’t mean they want bans on snacking and spanking and smoking — all of which are declining anyway.
Scots are a fair-minded people, and understand the difference between disapproving of something and forbidding it — a difference that contains the entirety of what we mean by an open society. A party that demands independence so as to make everyone less independent? As Scots often say in literature, and occasionally in real life, “Awa’ an’ bile yer heid!”
