Scotland

Chris Dillow has a splendid post filleting the Scottish government’s plans to raise the age at which one may purchase alcohol at an off-license from 18 to 21. As he rightly says this is the usual mixture of paternalism, petty managerialism and soul-crushing illiberalism trussed up with a justification that there’s a problem so, rather than enforce existing laws, the public needs the protection of additional measures that, regardless of their likely effectiveness, demonstrate that the government is listening and doing something. Anything. It’s too much to suppose that our parliamentarians might be impressed by any philosophical or moral objection to their creation of yet more laws prohibiting or curtailing

Scotland on Sunday’s splash yesterday highlighted a report to the UN written by from the country’s Children’s Commissioner which presents a ghastly, even dystopian vision of Scotland as being, it would seem, one of the worst places on earth in which to bring up children. We won’t even let them play, apparently. The report highlights a culture dominated by: • Adults who are so afraid of being accused of harming or neglecting children that they do not volunteer to work with them, leaving youngsters bored and harming their development; • Children often having difficulty accessing everyday services such as shops and buses, because they are treated with fear and mistrust

An occasional series in which we dare to take a look at what’s actually happening in the Scottish Parliament. Not, I warn you, for the faint of heart or the easily enraged. Now, yes, it’s true that most MSPs are well-intentioned, even kindly, souls concerned with the public good. But this takes them to some strange places. Consider these questions from “Health and Wellbeing” questions last week (what an awful title for a government ministry incidentally, one that explicitly endorses the idea of nannying adults)…

It could have been worse, I suppose. There was a proposal that you’d soon need a special license to be permitted to purchase cigarettes in Scotland. Presumably this would be accompanied by arm-twisting from “health care professionals” to persuade you to stop, or mandatory sessions with a shrink to demonstrate that you were indeed sufficiently and genuinely bonkers as to be granted a special license to enjoy abuse tobacco… Happily, if somewhat surprisingly, that proposal hasn’t actually passed. Yet. Still, yesterday the Scottish parliament confirmed that it was going to ban the display of cigarettes in shops. Apparently a ban on tobacco advertising – itself an outrageous abridgment of liberty

So, Panmure House, Adam Smith’s former Edinburgh home, has been sold. The ASI reports: Councillors in Edinburgh have approved the sale… to Heriot-Watt University. They chose the £800,000 bid over a higher offer, on the grounds that the University would make the building more accessible to the public. The University plans to restore the house to promote the study of economics. Hmmm. Wouldn’t it have been more appropriate to sell to the highest bidder?

And amazingly, it has nothing to do with Hillary Clinton. No, it’s Rangers’ Christian Dailly who, having seen the referee keep the Ibrox club’s SPL title ambitions alive yesterday had the effrontery, the gall, the unmitigated audacity to claim: that since arriving at Ibrox in January he has formed the impression that Rangers are more often on the wrong end of decisions. “There have been lots of decisions not given that should have been given in our favour,” he said. “It looks like a couple went our way today, but that is not the norm.” Words fail me. American readers may consider that this is akin to Michael Jordan complaining

This paragraph tells you most of what you need to know: The Scottish Government wants all primary schools to offer two hours of physical activity for all children each week – but figures from 2005 show that 5% of primary schools were meeting the provision. I suppose the situation may be better in secondary schools but to the extent that childhood obesity is a problem, you’re likely to have more success exercising the brutes than trying to monitor and control the sort of junk with which they stuff their faces. Plus, there are other benefits from sport too. But no, it’s more sensible to sell off the playing fields…

Happy St George’s day, English readers. To mark the occasion, the Telegraph offers us Simon Heffer, the would-be John Wilkes of our times, to declare the Union “as good as over”. And this, according to Heffer, is a fine thing since it ensures that England can finally be free from Tartan oppression. Apparently there’s been a conspiracy to to prevent the English from being, well, English: St     Patrick’s, St David’s and St Andrew’s days were decreed as the moments when the oppressed proclaimed their identity and possibly even their liberation. The only thing the English could possibly do on St George’s  Day was to reflect upon their centuries

In the past nine months four pubs in Selkirk, my home town, have closed. It would be simplistic to presume that the liberty-quashing smoking ban was the sole cause of this regrettable trend; it would be idiotic to suppose it didn’t play a part. Still, that’s only one part of legislators’ attempts to run publicans out of town. Consider this latest wheeze, for instance, as told by the Southern Reporter: Pub licensees, who currently pay £172 for a three-year licence to sell alcohol, will have to fork out up to £1,600 just to register their premises under the new [licensing] system. An annual fee on top of that has yet