What will happen to this small shopkeeper?
Photograph by Islay McLeod
Where will it all end? This week the Scottish government’s legislative ban on the open display of tobacco products in large shops comes into effect. It’s another victory for the pointy-noses and the folk who never tire of finding new laws to make themselves feel good. First it was health warnings on the packets. Then the ban on smoking in public buildings indoors. Now comes a ban on actually catching sight of the stuff.
The Tobacco and Primary Medical Services (Scotland) Act 2010 prohibits the display of tobacco and ‘smoking related products’. Pipes, cigars, cigarette papers: all the accoutrements that go with smoking.
A similar ban on displays on small shops (newsagents, petrol stations, corner shops) will follow suit in 2015. As if our high streets were not run down already, the Scottish government is about to give small neighbourhood retailers another kicking.
Smokers have gone along with a great deal in recent years. Many, like me, believe restrictions on smoking in restaurants and offices to be fair and welcome. And many would accept an argument for restraint in the display of tobacco products.
But they are displayed immediately behind the counter for a reason. Relentless tax increases have made tobacco expensive. The product is kept close to the retailer to minimise theft and to enable greater scrutiny at all times. Oh, and by the way: you don’t have to look.
But never mind such subtleties. We are long past the politics of ‘nudge’. This is not nudge, it’s dent. And it won’t be stopping at tobacco.
Bringing down the shutters is argued on health grounds. Health minister Michael Matheson says he is ‘delighted… These bans are the right step to prevent young people in Scotland from taking up smoking’. But selling to minors is already illegal. And the right of adults to choose? Up in smoke.
So how long will it be before alcohol displays are subject to a similar ban?
In supermarkets today the shutters are down on the display of tobacco products while alcohol products – particularly wines and spirits – are shown off with maximum display, the spirits sections often backlit to make the product more attractive.
The health argument is as strong as it is for tobacco. Alcohol-related deaths in Scotland each year are officially reckoned at more than 3,400. In 2010-11, there were 38,825 alcohol-related discharges from hospitals. In 2009-10, there were 4,042 alcohol-related discharges from psychiatric hospitals.
So if health is the rationale, why not bring down the shutters on alcohol displays too? And what other products might be the next to be forced behind the shutters? Sugar? Sweets and confectionery? Cakes and desserts? Once you pass a law to put one legal product behind steel blinds, why stop there?
Retailing in 2025 may be reduced to a long walk along aisles of frosted glass and painted shutters – blue for sugar products, green for alcohol, orange for tobacco, grey for magazines of a certain sort, and purple for fizzy drinks, cakes and desserts. And no peekin’, mind.
‘Anything for the weekend, sir? A can of beer and a packet of cigarette papers, you say? You’ll have to specify the brand sir, we’re not allowed to promote and we can’t show you what brands we’ve got.’
Now one small pleasure of retailing is serendipity: the discovery of a brand or a product variant that incites curiosity and stimulates the desire for change. Take pipe tobacco. It comes – or did once – in a myriad of wonderful grades, strengths, cuts and flavours. There’s bright leaf Virginia, Latakia from Syria and Cyprus, oriental or spicy fragrant tobaccos. Then there are dozens of different blends. Some will have a ‘pinch’ of perique to give it a spicy, peppery flavour. True perique tobacco comes from St James Parrish in Louisiana and there is said to be only one farmer left growing it.
Try explaining all this to the counter assistant with the hairnet at Tescos and you would be met with a blank stare.
My late father was a keen pipe smoker and I always remember him at Greene’s newsagents in Newmilns in Ayrshire’s Irvine Valley asking for a tin of ready rubbed Niggerhead shag. It was presented without the bat of an eyelid. Today that would probably land you a stretch in Barlinnie.
Now imagine the shutters coming down on those displays of whisky, the myriad of different malts, blends, bottles, tastes and strengths with exotic names and labels with their images of misty Scottish glens and soft-lit amber repose. It won’t be long before these, too, are hidden from view behind some ghastly aluminium shutter and shopkeepers demanding customers to name the brand they have come into buy and if you turn round and don’t look there just might be some in stock. Or more likely not.
As with tobacco and the next constraint – the banishing of packaging and sale only permitted in plain packets – it would be a counterfeiter’s dream come true.
Fortunately I have tracked down in far south-west Cornwall a wonderful tobacconist with a huge display case, great varieties of hand-rolled cigarette tobacco including brands with no additives; pipes, cigars and tobacco blends in exuberant tins of many types and descriptions. It operates a discreet mail order service. So while my pleasure arrives in a plain brown paper wrapper of the type the pointy-noses would surely approve, the joy within is unalloyed.
Bill Jamieson is the editor of ScotBuzz
