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All the family
scribes climbed
into a bottle
John Cameron
I am related to most Camerons in the Oban area and in the mid-1950s my father took me to a funeral so I could see a Highland wake before it passed into history.
At the wake a relative remarked that the deceased had kept his job in spite of his ‘problems’. My father later explained he had been an alcoholic bus driver with MacBraynes. It was such a family weakness the tribe really had to get out of the Highlands and I have always looked at the Clearances with a degree of ambivalence.
My equitable father only put his foot down twice: no motor bikes (I would kill myself)) and no career in journalism (all the family scribes eventually climbed into a bottle). The French side had no alcoholic tendency, though in my Anglo-Swedish wife’s family it was the Swedes, not the English, who had the drink problem. However, Britain badly needs an alcohol strategy and the binge drinking, especially among girls, would have appalled the miners’ wives in 1950s Slamannan.
There is a tsunami of health problems approaching, to say nothing of crime, anti-social behaviour, unwanted pregnancies and carnage on our roads. Our town centres – and not just in the industrial graveyards but in St Andrews as well – witness weekend mayhem which overwhelms our accident and emergency departments.
Government strategies north and south of the border have lots of good ideas, including greater local control of licensing and limits to the number of bars in one place. Higher fines for selling to underage drinkers and an extra levy on late-night sales to pay for policing are welcome but the centerpiece must be a minimum unit price for alcohol.
Predictably the industry claims that the government is tilting at the wrong target, but banning the loss-leading 20p can of supermarket lager is at least a step in the right direction. The little Metro in St Andrews has the highest wine sales of any Tesco outlet in the UK and students binge in their rooms before staggering out to the bars at midnight.
As regards changing cultural norms, I have no idea why my Scottish relatives have such problems and the French do not but maybe we could learn some lessons from tobacco.
My heart sank when George Osborne who – like Gordon Brown – had read history and never had a proper job outside politics was selected to be Tory chancellor.
For some reason historians make terrible chancellors and Winston Churchill, the only 20th-century finance minister as inept as Brown, was also an historical scribbler.
One of the features of the last-but-one Labour chancellor was the stealth tax slipped in under the Budget radar only to explode as soon as he had left the House of Commons. Osborne’s ‘granny tax’ was part of that loathsome genre and it is clear the present Tory finance team is as divorced from reality as Brown’s ’10p tax’ advisers. It was intolerable the allowance freeze was kept out of the media when the £3 billion thus raised will be the main source of funds for the various tax breaks for the better off.
Private sector ‘oldies’ without MPs’ gold-plated pensions need certainty and stability so they can eke out the dwindling assets saved from decades of taxed employment. Since the frugal elderly have already seen their annuities and investment income trashed by quantitative easing and miniscule interest rates, he was adding insult to injury. It was not even clear that a great crisis was brewing around Brown’s spoiler 50p tax rate, yet dropping it to 45p was the cause of so many other changes in the Budget.
To make around five million pensioners worse off while giving cash to 250,000 of the richest hedge-fund managers and Premiership footballers was simply imbecilic.
Osborne toured the studios to insist that pensioners will not lose out ‘in cash terms’ but weasel words cannot hide the fact that rising inflation will ensure such an outcome. He claimed to be simplifying the system but when added to the allowance for married couples born before 1935 it creates an even more complex array of age-related allowances.
There were good points such as a reversal of his oil-field blunders and an increase in the personal allowance to £9,205 which will improve the incentives of low earners to work. But sadly there was no break with Brownian tinkering and fiddling and no new ideas on airport expansion, planning shake-up or the looming catastrophe of the renewables mania.
John Cameron is a physicist and former Church of Scotland parish minister
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