Sunset clause for minimum pricing?

From The Telegraph:

Drinks manufacturers plan to persuade the Government into agreeing a “sunset clause” on minimum unit pricing, which would force ministers to scrap the controversial alcohol policy if it was proven not to work.

Nice idea, but no dice. What could be more reasonable than assessing a law after a year or two to make sure it hasn't failed or back-fired? This is just the kind of thing that a government who claims to hate "unnecessary legislation" would support, notwithstanding that such a government wouldn't contemplate minimum pricing in the first place.

Strangely, we don't have much of a history of using sunset clauses in the UK, which is good news for our many anti-[fill in the blank] groups who might otherwise see their pet prohibitions put under scrutiny. Instead, they concentrate on the next ban and hope the public forgets the extravagant promises they made about the last ban.

I notice that no temperance groups are quoted in the Telegraph article. What can they say? If they support a sunset clause, the government might seriously consider it. If they oppose it, people might suspect that they have no faith in their ridiculous claims, eg. that a 40p minimum price will save 900 deaths a year.

There will be no sunset clause. There will only be calls for the minimum price to rise to 60p, 70p, 80p, and those demands will never end (see Scotland where a "leading public expert" reckons a 60p unit will save—guess what?—900 lives a year). The only hope is for the EU to rule it a breach of free trade. As with plain packaging, it will be for the courts to decide. Ain't it grand that the Conservative party—the party of the free market—are supporting policies which require arbitration from the European Union and the World Trade Organisation?

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Anyone else noticed this?

I've had an e-mail from a chap called Andrew who has noticed something strange happen at his local supermarket since minimum pricing was mooted.

I wonder whether you have noticed the drinks industry and supermarket profiteering which has gone on recently following the "minimum price per "alcohol unit" or we all die!" hysteria.

I went to Sainsburys weekend before last and noticed own brand cider had gone up fifty pence. So I left it and looked for alternatives elsewhere. ASDA/Walmart around the corner still sold for the same price.

This weekend I went to ASDA/Walmart and noticed the price of own brand cider had gone up by a third (!). It used to be just over £1.50 and is now £2 (Gordon Brown pushed it up from about £1.20 by a duty hike later reversed - though not in shops). So I left that, too and found the stronger stuff being only slightly more and went for that. Good work, people. Customers will now go for stronger booze because it does not cost much more.

Has any other readers had the same experience?

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The minimum pricing Trojan Horse

My article at City AM yesterday begins thusly...

"THE era of big, bossy, state interference, top-down lever pulling is coming to an end.” So said David Cameron in 2008. Of all the hostages to fortune politicians take in their years in opposition, this has the makings of a classic. It’s hard to believe that less than two years have passed since the bright-eyed coalition promised to “tear through the statute book” as it threw intrusive and illiberal legislation on the bonfire.

Does anyone now remember the YourFreedom website which asked the public to nominate “unnecessary laws and regulations” for the scrap-heap? That project bit the dust when it transpired that the public wanted to repeal the drug laws and relax the smoking ban. The website now exists only in the National Archives, so future historians can marvel at the golden summer of 2010 when deregulation briefly seemed possible.

Read the rest here.

Not had enough minimum pricing comment? Check out Devil's Kitchen here and here, as well as Liberal Vision. PR disaster for the Tories. It's taken our minds off the budget in the same way a dose of syphilis takes your mind of your athlete's foot.

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Entirely a matter for you

I usually play snooker on a Friday night. Last night, however, I was preparing to go on Newsnight to talk about minimum pricing. I'd earlier spent an enjoyable hour on BBC Wales talking to the good people of the valleys about the same topic (callers were overwhelmingly against it). Newsnight suits my sleep patterns a lot better than the Today programme and I was pleased to be asked on, especially since it would involve going head-to-head with Sarah Wollaston. I was hoping to get my three main arguments across—that minimum pricing is deeply regressive, that Booze Britain is a modern moral panic and that the government has no right to dictate prices in a free market.

Soon after setting off on the train I got a text from the researcher who booked me, checking I was en route. Yes I was. All was good. Half an hour later I got another text saying they were going to have to drop me. Two hours before the show was due to go live, a replacement had been found in Eric Joyce MP.

As you can imagine, I was somewhat annoyed by the timing of this announcement, but I had some sympathy with the editorial decision. Eric Joyce is undeniably more famous than me and this was to be his first interview since leaving/being thrown out of the Labour party, and therefore a minor scoop.

But, at the risk of bearing sour grapes, I suspect that I would also be quite famous if I had head-butted a Tory MP in the House of Commons bar while out of my mind on discounted booze. And while I was prepared to go to the studio to be interviewed in person, Mr Joyce had no choice but to appear by video-link as a result of being under curfew after his conviction for common assault.

Joyce was very sound in attacking minimum pricing on the grounds that it would hit the poor hardest. He rightly called the policy "abominable". But while he made a good case, there was no getting away from the fact that 'drunken thug defends cheap booze' is not especially persuasive.

Consider, for example, where your sympathies would lie if you were an undecided voter sitting down to Newsnight and the two guests were introduced in the following way (this is a verbatim transcript of the presenters' introduction)...

"Sarah Wollaston is a GP and a Tory MP, not to mention a member of the Commons' Health Select Committee.

Eric Joyce, an MP against minimum pricing, was forced to quit the Labour Party after a drunken punch-up in the House of Commons bar. Tonight he's under curfew in his Edinburgh home."

Ooh, who to trust? I couldn't help but be reminded of Peter Cook's classic 'Entirely a Matter for You' sketch ("You may choose, if you wish, to believe the transparent tissue of odious lies which streamed on and on from his disgusting, greedy, slavering lips...")

As I got into Brighton train station, the phone rang with a researcher from Five Live asking me if I would go on at 11.15 pm to talk about alcohol. I've appeared on several Five Live shows in the past, including this late night slot, and, after the usual questions about what my views were, she said she'd call me at home at the agreed time and I would join the debate.

Since the other guests were to be a recovering alcoholic and an alcohol care worker, I was prepared to counter the inevitable sob stories by saying that policy should be based on empirical evidence, not tear-jerking anecdotes.

The call came at 11.10 pm and I listened to the recovering alcoholic's life story as I waited to be introduced. Then, after five minutes hanging on the line, I heard the voice of the producer regretfully informing me that I wouldn't be needed because there were so many calls coming in from people wishing to tell their tales of woe that there was no longer time.

I protested that I was already outnumbered by temperance folk as it was and that if I was excluded from the programme there would be no one to make the case against minimum pricing. He told me that the programme wasn't really about minimum pricing, but was a general phone-in about the "human cost of alcohol abuse". The fact that minimum pricing had been announced on the same day was, in effect, a coincidence.

I expressed some doubt about whether this was really so—why ask me on the show otherwise?—but I explained that even if it was, it must have occurred to the editor that an hour long misery memoir about people's 'booze Hell' could not fail to influence public opinion at a time when minimum pricing was the BBC's headline news story. It was, at best, an unfortunate editorial decision akin to getting women to talk about the pain and regret of terminating a pregnancy on the day the government announced a ban on abortion. (You can listen to this Victorian melodrama from 1.12 here—note the introduction).

The upshot of all this is that I will be playing snooker tonight instead. Undefeated since the start of the year and with a recent break of 35 to my name, I am a force to be reckoned with.

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Medical temperance - minimum pricing unveiled

It is rumoured that the British government will unveil plans for minimum pricing tomorrow [UPDATE: and it has - see update at the bottom or any media outlet - CJS]. I have written much about this subject on this blog in the last two years—that campaigners have used statistics dishonestly to promote the policy; that it is very likely to be illegal under EU law; that pub chains have gone all bootleggers 'n' baptists in their rent-seeking; that the BBC has bent over backwards to amplify the voice of temperance groups; that the government has used public money to lobby itself.

I see minimum pricing as a sister policy to plain packaging in that it will give the government an unprecedented right to impose its will on the free market. Sin taxes and health warnings are one thing. Having the government setting prices and seizing control of a product's entire packaging is quite another. These are powers that the government has never had in our peacetime history (correct me if you can think of an example to the contrary) and they are being taken without any kind of rational debate. The binge-drinking 'epidemic' is a modern moral panic which will baffle sociologists for years to come, and the packaging of cigarettes would be trivial if it were not such a blatant trampling of private and intellectual property.

As James Nicholls wrote recently:

That it is the Tories, rather than Labour, who have been first to throw their weight behind minimum pricing is remarkable enough: it is, after all, a concept entirely at odds with free market principles. 

Indeed so. Same old Labour whoever gets voted in. Our health secretary is a man who said, not so very long ago, that: "All our decisions must be evidence-based, and on that basis, we do not currently support an introduction of minimum pricing." Our Prime Minister is a man who said: "The era of big, bossy, state interference, top-down lever pulling is coming to an end." Our Deputy Prime Minister said: "For too long, laws have taken away you freedom, interfered with your life and made it difficult for businesses to get on."

It counts for nothing. This is a government that has already alienated the medical establishment (or, at least, has alienated the noisy element that makes it into the newspapers). Do they imagine they will get them on-side by throwing them this bone? Can they really imagine that the BMA will be satisfied with a bone? They are, as Mark Littlewood says, like the man who lets the alligator eat his arm in the hope that it will leave the rest of him.

Nothing—absolutely nothing—is more certain than that within weeks, perhaps days, of minimum pricing being introduced, you will hear the usual shrill voices complaining that 45p, or 50p, is mere "pocket money" and the minimum price should be 60p, 70p, 80p, £1 a unit. What hope can we have that the government will stand up to them then?

Nicholls makes a pertinent point about the pace of neo-prohibitionist activity in the 21st century:

Equally remarkable, however, is the sheer speed with which the idea of minimum unit pricing has moved from the margins to the centre of alcohol policy debates.

Funny to think that neither minimum pricing nor plain packaging were on the political radar at all five year ago. They were not even on the radar of our esteemed 'public health professionals'. There was a time when social reformers would work for decades to campaign for their causes. Today, we have two laws which will fundamentally change the government's role in the free market being nodded through in the blink of an eye.

The process of taking a policy from brainstorm to statute book has been sped up enormously by the rise of fake charities and the effective exclusion of public opinion from what is laughably called 'civil society'. Policy-making in Britain today is a closed shop with the self-described public health groups given the top seat at the table. This is, as Phil Mellows points out in a must-read blog post, is the triumph of 'medical temperance'.

What is medical temperance? It differs from 'gospel temperance' in that it does not seek to educate or persuade, only to legislate. But its goals of reducing availability and raising prices are in every way identical to the temperance groups of nineteenth century Britain. They said then, as they say now, that they are not prohibitionists and I believe most of them. What we are seeing is something more akin to 1870s England than 1920s America. As Laura Schmidt said last month:

What doesn't work is all-out prohibition -- that's very old-school and often creates more problems than it solves.

What does work are gentle "supply side" controls, such as taxing products, setting age limits and promoting healthier versions of the product

You remember Laura Schmidt? She's the one who wants sin taxes on sugary products because her Californian brain tells her they are "toxic". And so it goes on.

Every increase in price, as J. S. Mill said, is a prohibition to those who cannot afford to pay it. If minimum pricing is tabled in England, it will be another little prohibition to make the well-heeled elite feel better about themselves while the rest of us pay.


UPDATE:

An exceptionally crummy and one-sided article in The Guardian suggests that minimum pricing is a done deal.

Just hours after the revelation that alcohol has fuelled a 25% increase in liver deaths in the past decade, [you see how it works? See yesterday's post for details about this "revelation" - CJS] Downing Street has finally given health experts what they have long clamoured for – and what health secretary Andrew Lansley has resisted – a minimum price per unit.

The Telegraph is reporting that the minimum price would be set at 40p. This would have very little effect on the price of the vast majority of drinks and so is likely to displease libertarians and nannies in equal measure. My guess is that they will begin at 40p, win the argument because no one really cares about a bottle of wine being at least £3.60, and then jack the price up when the Bill gets to its final reading.

The EU will still over-rule it though, and we should send the BMA the bill for all the parliamentary time they wasted. Just need to hope that the EU doesn't collapse until all this is finished with.

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More pro-minimum price churnalism from the BBC

The BBC's minimum pricing campaign continues to tick along. Today's story is a straightforward cut and paste from a press release issued by the National End of Life Care Programme. I've never heard of them either, but they are funded by the Department of Health so it is no surprise to find them engaging in thinly-veiled political lobbying.

Liver disease deaths reach record levels in England

Deaths from liver disease in England have reached record levels, rising by 25% in less than a decade, according to new NHS figures.

You can guess where this is leading, I'm sure, so without any further ado let's hear from the chief executive of Alcohol Con.

The chief executive of Alcohol Concern, Eric Appleby, said: "This report shows that loss of life through alcoholic liver disease remains as big a problem as ever, with a worrying tendency for those with the highest deprivation to suffer most, leading to a distinct north/south divide.

"Minimum pricing of alcohol should do much to impact on the levels of drinking that lead to alcoholic liver disease, but health service commissioners must prioritise the disease at the local level too, focusing on ways to catch problem drinking early and so help to reduce the huge social and economic cost of the current death rate."

Readers with a keen ear for the weasel word might have noticed Appleby's slightly guarded description of alcoholic liver disease as being "as big a problem as ever", rather than—as the BBC would have you believe—a problem which has reached "record levels". This is because he knows that rates of alcoholic liver disease are not at record levels. They actually fell in the last year for which we have data, as the Office for National Statistics reported.

...between 2008 and 2009, the total number of deaths directly related to alcohol consumption fell by 2.7% (from 6,768 in 2008 to 6,584 in 2009), this is the first year-on-year decrease in the series. The main contributor to the overall decrease was a 5.6% decrease in deaths from alcoholic liver disease (from 4,400 in 2008 to 4,154 in 2009).

For those who crave visual stimuli, this is how the mortality figures for alcoholic liver disease look over the last decade.

I don't wish to make too much of a one year decline, although I do wonder if the story would have been reported rather differently if this was a graph of heart attack mortality following a smoking ban that had been introduced in January 2009. The fact that mortality from this disease fell between 2008 and 2009 does not mean that everything in the garden is rosy, but several things are worth mentioning.

Firstly, whether the disease kills 3,000 or 4,000 people a year, there are 51,000,000 of us living in this country (the figures are for England). You can always say that even one death is too many, but that is just sentimental, unrealistic rhubarb. Simply put, this is not an epidemic. We are talking about a rare disease brought on by extreme, chronic drinking and a serious addiction that afflicts mercifully few of us. Minimum pricing is not going to stop these people drinking any more than extreme poverty stops the homeless drinking. The problem is much deeper than the stunted minds of the tax-and-ban neo-temperance movement will ever understand.

Secondly, even if it is true that deaths from liver disease rose between 2008 and 2009, it is clear that alcoholic liver disease cannot have been responsible for the rise, as that fell by more than 5%. If Alcohol Concern are so concerned about the overall rate reaching "record levels", perhaps they should look at the underlying causes of the non-alcohol related cases which were responsible. In slight mitigation to the BBC, they do briefly mention obesity and hepatitis, albeit next to a photo of a pint of lager.

Thirdly, and most infuriatingly, nothing in this article—which looms large on the BBC's News website as I write this—is in any way news. All it does is remind us for the umpteenth time that rates of alcoholic liver disease are higher now than they were in 2001, but without mentioning the inconvenient fact that they may have peaked in 2008.

The statistics mentioned in the article were released nearly a year ago (Straight Statistics discussed them at the time). The BBC has referred to the long-term increase in deaths from liver disease in countless news stories, including such impartial gems as 'Liver specialist: Action needed on drinking culture', 'Alcohol policy a joke, says British Liver Trust' and 'Thousands are 'at risk of alcohol death' say doctors'. There is nothing new here whatsoever. A wing of the Department of Health has repackaged some old statistics and sent them out to lazy journalists with some helpful quotes from campaigners, that's all. They are not "new NHS figures". This is no more a news story than 'Brazil won lots of World Cups' is a sports story.

The only statistic that can be considered remotely current or newsworthy is the recent decline in the rate of alcoholic liver disease and, indeed, of alcohol-related deaths generally, but that doesn't get a look in. Nor does the fact that per capita alcohol consumption has fallen dramatically in the last five years (as I reported in a recent post).

This is churnalism, plain and simple, and politically motivated churnalism at that. Day after day, the BBC report any old junk and trivia fed to them by state-funded temperance groups who are clamouring for minimum pricing.

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Minimum pricing: what to expect

The ChaMPs Public Health Network—founded in 2003, entirely state-funded and involved in the dodgy minimumpricing.info website—is one of several arms of government working to impose minimum pricing on the public.

You will be hearing a lot of cant and nonsense about this scheme in the next few months as the Department of Health/British Medical Association PR machine turns up the throttle. The tone of the discussion can be gauged from a meeting hosted by ChaMPs in 2010 when the usual lies were presented as facts. For example, they said that the price of alcohol has fallen in real terms since 1980. In fact, alcohol has risen by 20% in real terms. Either they don't know what 'real terms' means, or they are willfully misleading the public.

No, it's not.

The interesting thing about this meeting is that the attendees were quite aware of all the drawbacks of minimum pricing. They worried that the policy...

Could stimulate adverse publicity. Alcohol is still socially acceptable.

Yes, "still". But not if they get their way, because the anti-smoking blueprint of denormalisation remains their template...

Help culture change and cover the whole population (like the tobacco agenda)

Need to find ways of making alcohol less socially acceptable and seen as a public problem. (Lessons learned from Smoke Free).

It's interesting to note that, in contrast to absurd claims that minimum pricing will "save nearly 10,000 lives a year", this meeting found that...

Evidence of a positive impact would be hard to find as alcohol has such a long term impact on health.

Several of the criticisms of minimum pricing made on this blog and elsewhere over the last two years also feature...

Would there be a risk that harmful drinkers move on to replacement risky behaviours? They many neglect buying healthy food in preference to alcohol for example. Could increase the gap in health inequalities

Is there risk it will encourage more people to experiment with home brewing?

Legislation in itself will not impact on attitudes of high level drinkers and doesn’t tackle the reasons why people drink.

They were also worried that their cost estimates, though vastly inflated, did not appear big enough.

Cost benefits quoted don’t sound very impressive (12.9 billion over 10 years saved against 20 billion per year cost). 

Their answer to this problem acts as a golden rule for the whole campaign.

We need to be careful which statistics and messages we are using if we are to convince and not undermine.

And I'm sure you will.

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Slip of the tongue?

Last week, a new report was published by the Royal College of Physicians on the subject of drinking and sexually transmitted diseases. The conclusions weren't very interesting (there's a link between the two, would you believe?!), but one sentence stood out...

As already noted, there is good evidence that health promotion interventions at a societal level (such as increasing the unit price of alcohol) are more effective than health education messages directed at adolescents.

An interesting choice of words in the parentheses there, as we don't currently price alcohol by the unit. (No country does, so from whence does this "good evidence" come?) We can hardly increase the unit price when we don't charge by the unit.

Slip of the tongue? Perhaps the RCP expected minimum pricing to be law by the time their report came out. Or perhaps they were just getting ahead of themselves.

Either way, if those moral imbeciles in Westminster do give minimum pricing the green light, you can expect to see the words "increasing the unit price of alcohol" in every document from Alcohol Concern, the RCP and the BMA for years to come. Once that Pandora's Box is open, the demands for the unit price to rise will be endless and unforgiving.

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Unfree Enterprise

Ted Tuppen:
Plenty to look miserable about

Few things are less edifying than an industry conspiring with the government to screw over its competition. The Coca-Cola company's support for Prohibition was driven by a transparent pursuit of profit. The makers of Nicorette and Champix not only support the EU's snus ban but are lobbying for the prohibition to be extended to all smokeless tobacco products. It's cynical and it's opportunistic. It's rent-seeking.

Britain's pub industry is going down the same dismal road. Yes, the pubs have been victims of punitive legislation themselves. Yes, they could have done more to oppose the smoking ban. And yes, we have some of the highest alcohol taxes in the world, but that it is no excuse for this...

Tuppen: Supermarkets may need to be "bullied"

Supermarkets may need to be “bullied” into adopting a responsible pricing strategy on alcohol according to Enterprise Inns chief executive Ted Tuppen.

First the Scottish Licensed Trade Association, then Greene King, and now Enterprise Inns. All lining up to demand a new bad law to make up for another bad law. They all share the delusion that minimum pricing will drag back the customers that the smoking ban drove away. Ted Tuppen is the guy who, in 2007, predicted that "the ban will lead to a number of pub closures across the industry, particularly amongst lower quality wet-led outlets." But, he said, Enterprise Inns would be just dandy:

"However, we are confident of a positive outcome as the smoking ban becomes an accepted part of pub-going and licensees and customers alike enjoy the benefits of the more pleasant, healthier, smoke free regime."

Since then, Enterprise has sold hundreds of its pubs and its share price has collapsed from £7.00 in July 2007 to 29p today. Winning!

The Enterprise boss also launched an attack on the government’s “punitive” beer duty escalator, saying it is time to “level the duty playing field so cynically distorted” by George Osborne and “put right the duty wrong perpetrated by Gordon Brown”.

Ah, the fabled "level playing field", destroyer of jobs, killer of businesses. Funny how the playing field is always levelled down but never up, isn't it? I recall Enterprise Inns pleading for a level playing field back in 2006...

Hubert Reid, Enterprise chairman, said: "If a total ban is inevitable, then it should be imposed across the board, including 20,000 private members clubs, in order to create a level playing field for all those employed or operating within the hospitality and leisure industry."

To be clear, the exemption for private members' clubs would have distorted the market and been unfair to public houses. It would have been better for the consumer, but it was still a rotten law.

Back in 2006, it may have seemed good business to demand the government shaft all licensed premise with equal vigour. With hindsight, a united front against the whole illiberal law would have been better. The pubco's must now regret getting into bed with the anti-smoking lobby in 2006, just as they will live to regret getting into bed with the temperance lobby on the minimum pricing issue.

“Pubs don’t want to be treated as a special case but we do need to see an end to the discrimination which will lead to more pub closures and more job losses,” said Tuppen.

No, Mr Tuppen. Being treated as a special case is exactly what you want. The on-license and off-license trade are completely different industries selling completely different services. Off-licenses sell alcohol. Pubs sell an experience. There can be no level playing field. The pub experience is necessarily more expensive. It involves washing glasses, larger premises and—above all—extortionate rents to greedy pubcos so that their CEOs can pocket £1.2 million a year.

“I am uncomfortable with the imposition of minimum pricing, no matter how attractive it might seem. I believe that we need a society which suffers from less regulation and not more.

Well, that's more like it, sir. So, no more silly talk of minimum pricing then?

“However, a minimum pricing level may well be necessary if we are to have a ban on below-cost selling." 

D'oh!

It is plainly nonsense to say that minimum pricing is needed to ban below-cost selling. However, if Mr Tuppen thinks that selling alcohol below is such a great way to get ahead in the licensed trade, why doesn't he try doing it for a few weeks and see how it goes? He will soon find out why—as even the temperance lobby now admits—below-cost selling is as rare as hen's-teeth.

"Can we ask the supermarkets to be responsible? This is really where the industry, the Association of Licensed Multiple Retailers, the British Beer & Pub Association are all in loud agreement."

The pub industry are united in wanting the state to shaft their competitors? Well, stone me.

"Like cigarettes, why shouldn’t alcohol be sold behind the counter rather than picked up by anyone from the shelves?"

Because cigarettes are small, high value items which makes them a perfect target for shop-lifters. Are you seriously suggesting that people would go to pubs more if they had to buy alcohol from a supermarket counter? And do you really think it is wise, as the head of a pub company, to equate alcohol with cigarettes? There are enough temperance nuts doing that already without you helping them out.

"There should be a clear restriction on irresponsible advertising and multipack sizes could be reduced to say a pack size of four, rather than 20."

What on earth is this fellow babbling about? Is this meant to be "nudging"? Give me gospel temperance over the doctrine of piddling inconvenience.

"There should be a ban on external advertising of price, something I think which would equally apply to pubs."

Does the phrase "cutting off your nose to spite your face" mean anything to you, Ted?

"These are simple solutions which the supermarkets should be encouraged, or perhaps bullied to follow, perhaps through a voluntary code of practice."

There's nothing like bullying people to make them do things voluntarily, is there? And that's what this is all about: bullying. Ted Tuppen is the mouthy little oik standing behind the big kid, goading him on. Too stupid and cowardly to do anything himself, he relies on the bully to beat up his enemies. Utterly pathetic. Boycott Enterprise Inns while you still can. There aren't many left.

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Minimum pricing - still illegal

Scotland's dreadful health secretary Nicola Sturgeon has been banging the drum for minimum alcohol pricing policy at a SNP conference. As with plain packaging in Australia, the opportunity of attracting some media attention from an otherwise indiffernt world is the pathetic carrot being dangled.

The 1,300 gathering heard Ms Sturgeon say: "Delegates, I can tell you today that our minimum pricing bill will be reintroduced to parliament within the next month.

"When that bill is passed, Scotland will become the first country to introduce a minimum price per unit of alcohol. The world is watching us."

Not so much "when" as "if", since minimum pricing is almost certainly illegal under EU law. Rather than wasting time and money on this doomed policy, the Sturgeon General should listen to expert opinion, like this report from Rand Europe.

Minimum prices for alcoholic beverages, also sometimes called Social Reference Prices, are used in different ways in a number of areas outside the EU, including several Canadian provinces (Saskatchewan, Ontario, Newfoundland, New Brunswick, etc) where the regulation applies to licensed on-trade premises (Strang 2008).

But while a recent Scottish expert consultation concluded that minimum pricing is possible under EU competition law, ‘provided that minimum prices are imposed on licensees by law or at the sole instigation of a public authority’ (SHAAP 2007), minimum pricing practices have tended to be seen as trade-distorting by the European courts (as setting an artificial price floor amounts to resale price maintenance, limiting and distorting price competition), and therefore not typically put in place in the EU (Baumberg and Anderson 2008).

Minimum prices had also been considered, and even introduced through legislation in a few Member States such as Austria and Ireland, for cigarettes as a public health measure, but these moves were contested by the European Commission. This was in line with the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice, which considers that minimum prices infringe Community law, distort competition and benefit manufacturers by safeguarding their profit margins.

Council Directive 95/59/EC states that manufacturers and importers of tobacco products have the right to determine the retail selling price of their products; according to ECJ jurisprudence minimum prices impair this right and are therefore not compatible with this Directive. The ECJ also stated that minimum prices are not necessary since their health objectives can be achieved through increases in taxation.

This report was commission by the European Commission and the sources given in this particular section include "personal communication from European Commission Directorate General Competition official."

When is Sturgeon going to take the hint?

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