Demon drink in Scotland

Press, 15 September 1976, Page 28

Demon drink in Scotland

By BRIAN WILSON of the Observer Foreign News Service Stornoway Scotland — the home of some of the world's hardest liquor — is painfully coming up-to-date with its drinking laws. Since 1853 public bars have been closed in all parts of Scotland on Sunday, and on week-days customers have been turned away at 10 o’clock in the evening. The British Parliament has now voted in favour of relaxing these harsh laws, which are a legacy of the Swiss theologian, Calvin, whose brand of Protestantism was widely accepted in Scotland after the Reformation.

The vote was carried in the teeth of opposition from the Labour Government, which hoped to curry favour with the Scottish Nationalists, and Dr lan Paisley, the Protestant Ulster Unionist member of Parliament from Northern Ireland, who views drinking with the same distaste as he views the perils of Rome. The change is one of the most controversial aspects of a 141-clause Parliamentary Bill to reform Scottish drink licensing laws, and is the long-de-layed sequel to the report of a special committee aimed at making drinking more “civilised" in Scotland.

The hard-line Calvinists, however, are staunchly

opposed to any relaxation in the law. The Sabbath Day purists are mostly to be found in the Free Church, a breakaway branch of the Church of Scotland. The current issue of the Free Church’s “Monthly Record’’ editorial thunders, “The nation appears to be hell-bent on its own destruction. If the pattern of Biblical history means anything, we as a nation are just ripening for judgment.

“Scottish pub-drinking is about as civilised as a wild cat and Sunday opening will not likely tame it,” says the editorial. While the Free Church’s attitude is predictable, the British Government’s show of hostility to Sunday

opening is probably motivated by a simple desire to put as much distance as possible between itself and a piece of legislation which could have political repercussions in the area of Scottish nationalism. Scotland will now come in line with the drink licensing hours of most of Britain. Sunday opening, which will be optional, will not come into effect until the autumn of next year, but the other major change — the extension of drinking time till 11 p.m. — will start at the end of this year.

The secretary of the Scottish Licensed Trades Association (Mr E. Ridehalgh) welcomed the Sunday drinking decision. “The association has favoured optional opening all along, and this is what we have got. I cannot understand the argument that opening pubs on Sundays will lead to more alcoholism. Anyone who wants a drink on a Sunday can get it already in a hotel. Spreading the trade over more premises should not lead to more alcoholism.”

Another reform particu* larly welcomed by the association is the abolition of veto polls which could be used to make areas “dry.” The threat of a poll has been successfully sued in the Western Isles to deter hotels from exercising seven-day licences.

A spokesman of the Church of Scotland’s working party on alcoholism said that all available evidence indicated that a higher incidence of alcoholism would be a direct result of Sunday opening. "We are greatly disturbed by the'decision of

a majority of M.P.s taken in spite of a strong body of medical opinion in this country, and at World Health Organisation level against relaxation of licensing laws,” he said. One group which might welcome Sunday pub opening are the guests in Scottish hotels who are at present bewildered to find sedate cocktail bars turned into seething masses of drinking humanity on the Seventh Day as Scotland’s drinkers fight for an uncivilised drink.