EACH year it seems Scotland’s application to become the most progressive and enlightened wee nation on God’s earth is strengthened. Another gilded entry into our national CV was made this week when Scotland became the first in the world to set a minimum price for alcohol. Five years after the legislation was approved by Holyrood, the UK Supreme Court ruled it didn’t breach European Law and it was a “proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim”. This aim couldn’t be simpler: to set a 50p-per-unit minimum to help tackle Scotland’s “unhealthy relationship with drink” by raising the price of cheap, high-strength alcohol.

Earlier in the week the Scottish Government launched a consultation on proposed reforms to transgender legislation among which would reduce the minimum age of applicants seeking a gender recognition certificate from 18 to 16. This is nothing more than re-writing the laws of nature in a delusional attempt to appear edgy and in-touch. The consequences will be dire. This comes on top of the Government’s obsession with imposing a Named Person on the families of disadvantaged communities and seeking to ban smacking. There is not an area of Scottish family life and, in particular, the behaviour of its working classes, in which Holyrood does not want to have a stake. Even its baby boxes (a very good thing) include several packets of condoms (nope; I don’t know why either). Are they trying to imply the feckless lower orders are having too many babies who will spend most of their formative years being smacked before requiring the intervention of a Named Person? If so, then in this whole area at least there is evidence of “joined-up thinking,” that ubiquitous but curiously elusive commodity governments like to think they possess.

Scotland’s relationship with alcohol is indeed a ruinous one and there are few among my own contemporaries who haven’t had cause sporadically to scrutinise the amount of alcohol we consume. Hardly a month passes when a newspaper or periodical doesn’t publish a questionnaire designed to let you judge for yourself whether your drinking habits are verging on problematic. I stopped filling them in years ago because they all seemed to tell me the same thing: I was a hopeless soak who was destined for an early, swally-induced grave. I wasn’t actually but it’s an area that requires constant supervision.

For the middle-classes and those who can set aside a not insubstantial budget for their weekly alcohol requirements, the minimum-pricing legislation will not matter a jot. They can afford to drink expensive wine in good restaurants and pretend they have recently become whisky connoisseurs. In these ways problem drinkers with a degree of affluence can camouflage their habits for a while, though it always gets you in the end.

Those affected most by minimum alcohol pricing are working class communities and especially young people who can obtain their entire weekly recommended maximum of units of alcohol for £3 or less. When someone as globally respected in his field as our former chief medical officer Sir Harry Burns says this policy will result in fewer deaths then even a cynic like me needs to pay attention. Reading Darren McGarvey’s new book, Poverty Safari, also offers a grim insight into how alcohol addiction can devastate families in disadvantaged communities.

If the Scottish Government is genuinely serious about loosening working class communities’ relationship with alcohol then it can’t merely put this legislation in place and then walk away from it, saying: “Look, we’ve done this.” Minimum pricing will not itself address the root causes of alcohol abuse in our poorest communities. One of its pet targets in this sector are the manufacturers of Buckfast. Yet the makers of this fortified wine do so with an acute awareness of their social responsibility. It is far from cheap and is never advertised or marketed. Despite this it has assumed legendary status among young people throughout west central Scotland, and not just those from poorer areas.

For the Government it provides a quick and easy scapegoat for the ills that bedevil these places and a convenient camouflage for their political inertia in tacking the root causes of deprivation.

Alcohol abuse is merely one in a multi-headed apocalypse which stalks poor communities. It was present 150 years ago in the same places and to more or less the same extent as it is now. Think about that for a moment. There are some places in 21st-century Glasgow where low life expectancy caused by health inequality, alcohol abuse and poor living standards has not significantly improved in 150 years. What have we been doing all this time? What makes the Government think setting a minimum price for alcohol will deal with this? It will help but if it’s not part of an all-inclusive, far-reaching, long-term commitment then it is worthless.

Alongside this legislation there needs to be action taken on the obscene and predatory behaviour of betting shops and the way they are permitted to proliferate on the high streets of our poorest communities. In-work poverty caused by low wages and the refusal of many firms to recognise trade unions has led to the widespread use of food banks. Why are many of these firms still permitted to fill their boots and enhance their management bonus schemes with lucrative state contracts? Why are they still being ripped off by financial institutions and by the energy cartels? The absence, until now, of anything approaching a social housing programme to offset Margaret Thatcher’s Right-to-Buy subterfuge is a stain on 18 years of devolved left-wing government. The failure to effect any sort of meaningful and radical reform in our schools has condemned working class children, with very few exceptions, to a lifetime on the margins. Alcohol abuse becomes a symptom of this much bigger disease not the cause of it.

By all means stop poor kids having cheap access to the demon drink but what will we do about the other demons that have possessed these communities for generations?