A century on, Scotland still has a drink problem

The tragedy of the Rab C Nesbitt caricature is that there is a lot of truth in it – Scots do tend to have more problems with booze then those in the rest of the UK. Things are improving: today’s figures show that the alcohol-related death rate for men in Scotland is 29.8 per 100,000 – down from 45.5 per 100,000 ten years ago. But in England, this rate stands at 17.8 per 100,000.

Now, I’m all in favour of Scots who enjoy a drink – we employ one of them, the peerless Bruce Anderson, as our wine columnist. But today’s statistics put me in mind of a leading article we ran in The Spectator a hundred years ago, when there was a temperance movement trying enact prohibition in Scotland during the war:-

‘At present the economic waste caused by drunkenness in Scotland is enormous.