Meeting of the Parliament 04 February 2016
Presiding Officer, there has been a 300 per cent increase in alcohol-related liver disease mortality over the last 30 years and over 35,000 alcohol-related stays in Scottish hospitals in the last recorded year, with the majority of them being emergency admissions. Scottish deaths from liver disease are among the highest in Europe and that comes at an enormous cost, as Graeme Pearson has detailed. A fifth more alcohol is sold in Scotland compared to England and Wales. Some 75 per cent of prisoners were drunk at the time of committing the offence for which they were sentenced.
The Scottish Conservatives have a conundrum. The last time that we discussed alcohol in the Scottish Parliament was on 4 June 2015, which was the first time that the issue had been discussed since May 2012, three years before. By June 2016, it will be more than four years since we passed the minimum unit pricing legislation.
Richard Simpson is right, because throughout the torrid passage of that bill, Alex Salmond stood at the dispatch box trying to touch our hearts—trying to make glass eyes weep across Scotland—with his personal commitment to changing the relationship that Scotland has with alcohol, and yet after that there was no debate for three years. Last summer’s debate was at the request of opposition parties and today’s debate has been truncated so as to be the shortest introduction of a member’s stage 1 bill of any of the last five that the Parliament has considered.