IT’S not often I disagree with fellow National columnist Kevin McKenna, but this week I do have a quibble over minimum unit alcohol pricing or MUP. To say Kevin is not a fan would be an under-statement. In yesterday’s column he suggested that: “Henceforth, the first day of May (the day minimum pricing was enacted) shall be known as Prohibition of Intoxicating Swally in Scotland (PISS) day… marked by a series of cultural activities the length and breadth of Scotland especially targeted at those communities which have been most disfigured by easy access to cheap booze.”

After some colourful side-swipes at the “champagne-drinking elites” who’ve put the dampers on booze, and tongue in cheek suggestions for eradicating other bits of anti-social behaviour like wearing trackie bottoms, Kevin cuts to the chase over the minimum pricing policy: “Our political and media classes could cut out this sanctimonious and self-congratulatory bullshit about changing the lives of Scotland’s poorest and most disadvantaged communities.

“Health inequality and the educational attainment gap are fuelled by decades of failure to deal with the fallout from de-industrialisation. An over-reliance on cheap booze and drugs are the mere symptoms of our wholesale failure to reduce poverty in areas, which have suffered it for more than a century. It would be far more radical to treat the causes and not merely the effects.”

Actually I don’t disagree.

Poverty and inequality obviously fuels a large part of the desire to get “out of your head” in the poorest parts of Scotland. But there are a few other points worth making too.

First, minimum pricing won’t be the first attempt to target drinkers in areas of deprivation. They are already targeted by the alcohol industry. A report by the Scottish Centre for Research on Environment, Society and Health (CRESH) found 40% more alcohol outlets in deprived neighbourhoods than wealthy ones and a direct correlation between the number of outlets and alcohol related deaths, hospitalisation rates and crime rates. So you could argue that an unrestricted deluge of cheap alcohol is being allowed to flood and harm the most deprived parts of Scotland.

But because we have lived for so long with de-regulation and low-key licensing it feels wrong to introduce even a small and responsible level of regulation. And remember, if MUP doesn’t work, a sunset clause will take it back off the statute books in five years time.

Secondly, most folk living in poverty are not problem drinkers. According to Colin Angus from the Institute for Alcohol Studies at Sheffield University, there are twice the average number of tee-totallers in deprived areas and of the 75 per cent who do drink, most do so moderately.

However 5% consume much more alcohol than harmful drinkers who don’t live in poverty: 4500 units per year (equivalent to around 170 bottles of vodka), compared to 3350. This means “hazardous and harmful drinkers living in poverty, who represent just 2.6% of the adult population, experience 23% of all deaths caused by alcohol”.

So what do we do with that knowledge – ignore it? Waiting to reverse income inequality will take too long to reach these folk and help protect others around them. In 2012, alcohol was a factor in 35 per cent of all A&E cases and up to 70 per cent at the weekend. Thousands of kids called Childline to help cope with incapacitated, inconsistent and alcohol-dependent parents. All these problems were worse in deprived areas. In short, those who tan the bottle where money is short, make life still harder for the adults and kids trying to cope all around them.

Thirdly, history suggests the price of alcohol does make a big difference to health in Scotland. During the First World War, tax increases made beer more expensive and weaker and opening hours were cut.

By 1918 alcohol consumption had fallen sharply, as had rates of liver cirrhosis mortality. After the war, alcohol consumption declined still further, and in 1931 the Mackay Commission on Scottish Licensing pointed to six possible causes: a better understanding of health; alternative leisure pursuits; better education; better licensing law; improved housing; and – note well -- the increased cost of alcohol due to taxation.

Now of course, it’s no coincidence that the inter-war period also saw a massive growth in outdoor pursuits like cycling and walking, often organised by socialist groups like the Clarion Movement, the Socialist Sunday Schools and the less revolutionary Boy Scouts. There was poverty, unemployment and depression, but our grandmothers and fathers somehow made it their mission to get out of cities at every available opportunity. In fact, alcohol consumption remained low across the UK throughout the 1930s until the early 60s when restrictions on opening hours were gradually relaxed.

It’s important to know this. Sometimes we think it’s hopeless to try and tackle Scotland’s relationship with the bottle, because it feels like such an engrained habit. Yet it’s not so long ago that Scots drank at the same level as the rest of Europe. In 2010 chronic liver disease accounted for 9% of adult deaths in Scotland for men and 7% for women. But in 1955 it was just 1%. Of course a technocratic fix like raising prices won’t change things on its own.

But it might help steer us away from a truly abnormal situation where alcohol has become cheaper than bottled water.

So let’s be honest. There’s something else going on. It’s not that Scots tend to drink. It’s the myth that you must drink to be Scottish.

For some folk – and I’m not talking about Kevin here – a real Scot must regard moderation with suspicion and balance with contempt. The Celtic outlook believes more is more. If one voddie is good, 10 will be 10 times better. Pacing yourself, alternating alcoholic drinks with soft drinks, not getting drunk at all – these are all unpatriotic behaviours associated with “jumped up” folk who think their life path, career and tomorrow are worth putting first.

For those with no great investment in tomorrow, the future isn’t important – the moment is sacred. And even though the average Scot is no longer a “grab it and run” victim of industrial capitalism, a lot of behaviour associated with chronic poverty hasn’t changed. Like our drinking behaviour.

Eradicating poverty will not immediately change this. Perfectly rational, middle-income Scots currently believe their lives would be more boring, empty and flat without the reward, rule-breaking and excitement that accompanies getting “wasted”.

So what about providing a different form of release and adventure? Now bear with me cos this will sound as weird as Kevin’s May Day celebration and as paternalistically do-gooding as Minimum Alcohol pricing itself -- from the critic’s perspective. How about giving every family in Scotland the chance to escape every weekend to a wee wooden hut? Titter ye not.

When workers across northern Europe were first given statutory time off work in the 1920s and 30s, moral panics abounded. Even in right-on Sweden churches and unions were actually against the move on the grounds that workers would only use their spare time to drink. So fairly quickly there was a push to get workers outdoors, building huts, having a stake in society and releasing energy in nature not in the pub.

In short, the Nordic nations did three big things in the last century. They transformed their societies to have the smallest income gaps in the world. They also made sure their citizens shared the social goods of health and leisure. And they banged up the price of alcohol, forcing folk to buy from state-run shops – massively restricting alcohol outlets to just one per town or village. Now, I recognise we are not Norway, Norwegians are not exactly sitting in the mountains drinking Ribena and a weekend in a hut is not everyone’s idea of heaven.

But the fact such a modest proposal is impossible to imagine or achieve in quasi-feudal Scotland may tell us more than we can imagine about the underlying reason for Scotland’s despairing dependence on booze.

People consume what is cheap and available. In Norway that is land. In Scotland that is booze. Something’s got to change. MUP is a good start.