Sunday Herald Editorial

Nearly everyone knows the song made famous by Will Fyffe in the 1920s about a common working man having a drink on Saturday and Glasgow then belonging to him. It's a song and an attitude we still laugh at; a joke that we can't, and don't want to, shake off.

The rest of Fyffe's lyrics say there's nothing wrong in taking a drink because it ends all your troubles and gives you the good feeling that when you get home "you don't care a hang for the wife". Music hall Scotland in the 1920s laughed, and the rest of world joined in. They still do.

With a culture of excessive drinking still prevalent in Glasgow, and indeed throughout the rest of Scotland, you would expect the joke to be wearing thin. It isn't. Glasgow or any city centre in Scotland on a Friday or a Saturday night is no place to feel you want to belong to. Fuelled by cheap alcohol in pubs, off licences and supermarkets, our city centres are threatening places, unsafe for families and strangers not familiar with the rules of the road that say don't look up and walk fast.

Alcohol-related crime is consistently high in Scotland. Violence and drink are old pals. Our hospitals are packed with illness and disease directly related to alcohol abuse. It's as though we laughed at Fyffe's joke, and have spent the last 80 years worshipping its message that getting pissed and behaving badly and violently is a cultural signature we are happy to live with.

Politicians have regularly called for an end to Scotland's unshakeable relationship with alcohol. But the messages, delivered over decades, have been inconsistent, poorly funded and barely audible. Most have been noise rather than action. Now the SNP-led Scottish government is turning its attention to this major problem.

So far its recommendations have included an end to cheaply-available alcohol, with a minimum price that would be available across all retail outlets. It has also proposed that the age for buying alcohol in off-licences and supermarkets be raised to 21, though the current 18 level would still apply in pubs, clubs and restaurants. A consistent message? We don't think so.

Increasing the age requirement around a busy city centre supermarket or off-licence will have little effect. If an 18, 19 or 20-year-old wants to buy drink they'll do so in much the same way that 16 and 17-year-olds do at the moment. On price, Sweden among Europe's major countries knows well that changing behaviour is not easy. Cheap liquor in 19th century industrialised Sweden nearly destroyed its male workforce. Ration cards, a government monopoly on production with prices kept excessively high, off-licences that looked like featureless pharmacies, closed at the weekends. Swedes, like the Scots, may still regard alcohol as just the route to getting drunk, but their harsh regime was born out of political desperation over a problem it could not find a cure for. Their cure has brought its own problems: the black market is huge, with around a third of all alcohol sales classified as criminal. So what message from this does the government in Scotland take?

It should first accept - before we try to impose behaviour-altering taxes - that we have a dependency on alcohol, and it's a cultural dependency that needs to change. Before any policy can be effective, we must first change our view that getting smashed is acceptable. Glasgow, or anywhere else in Scotland, shouldn't belong to the drunks, it should belong to everyone.