Raucous Hogmanay is a myth. The thousands expected to celebrate in Princes Street Gardens tonight are a minority for whom hope has triumphed over climate. Fewer than one in nine of us will go first footing and just 6% will attend a party. But one tradition endures. Most people will see in the new year by drinking a toast with family and significant others.

At least, they will this year. By 2008 the bottles to render an evening sociable may be prohibitively expensive – more remortgage than modest tipple.

“First they came for the smokers, but you did not speak up because you did not smoke. Then they came for the obese, but you did not speak up because you were not fat,” as Martin Niemöller did not say in more harrowing circumstances.

However, his warning against indifference is appropriate. The state is preparing to attack our freedom to consume alcohol and Scotland must resist. Too many concessions have been made to the delusion that government exists to regulate private behaviour. It is time to assert John Stuart Mill’s guidance: “The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited: he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.”

Of course there are among the sanctimonious legions of state-salaried meddlers many who imagine that Mill supports them on the alcohol question. Take Scottish Health Action on Alcohol Problems (Shaap), the group set up by Scotland’s medical royal colleges to increase awareness of the problems associated with drinking.

Last week it reinforced the executive’s woefully wasteful “Alcohol. Don’t Push It” campaign (many expensive television slots: zero impact) by calling for a sharp rise in alcohol prices. Apparently the logic is obvious. “It is no coincidence that the price of alcohol has reduced significantly in recent years and that alcohol related assaults are now at an alarming level,” declared Dr Bruce Ritson, Shaap’s chairman.

Actually, it is a coincidence and Ritson should get out a bit more, ideally in café-culture nations such as France. I can show him bars in Morlaix where a parsimonious booze hound can get plastered for half what the same hangover would cost in Edinburgh.

At a branch of supermarket chains such as Géant or Intermarché he could buy enough to promote cirrhosis in an entire rugby team for less than the price of a takeaway curry in Glasgow. So why do the French have fewer examples of drunken violence? Might culture come into it just a huge bit?

Doctors inevitably witness the worst effects of drink-sodden stupidity. They stitch the wounds and certify the corpses produced by Scotland’s infantile relationship with drink. But that does not make them the best people to devise policy on alcohol. This country’s peculiar reverence for the medical profession promotes a regrettable tendency to imagine that doctors are wise on subjects beyond their sphere of expertise. In fact their training is deplorably narrow and their understanding of politics often facile to the point of naivety.

Shaap, like the political interventionism it promotes, is utterly wrong on pragmatic and ethical grounds. Making drink more expensive will not prevent an alienated underclass abusing it. They will turn to illegal distilling, home brewing, smuggling and theft. Such activities are unthinkable to law abiding do-gooders, but instinctive to desperate addicts.

Anyone who doubts it should contemplate the scale of cigarette smuggling to the UK. More than 30m tax-free cigarettes were seized in 2006, the tip of an iceberg of organised crime that makes vast profits by feeding an insatiable appetite.

The victims of tax increases on alcohol will not be the thugs and wife-beaters who fill casualty wards. They seek inebriation, not pleasure. Taxes will bite hardest on calm, respectable drinkers who prefer flavour to brain neutralising impact.

“Freedom and whisky gang thegither,” was Robert Burns’s advice — but any percentage tax hits a glass of malt harder than a bottle of Buckfast. Thousands of affluent Scottish professionals will be penalised. They may ignore government advice on safe levels of consumption. But they also revile violence, never drink and drive and are richly entitled to adopt the habits of that joyful libertarian H L Mencken who “made it a rule never to drink by daylight and never to refuse a drink after dark”.

“Secondary drinking” does not exist (although I am waiting to see it invented), so the case that won the ban on smoking in public places does not apply to alcohol. People who drink too much without hitting other people harm only themselves.

If state intervention in our use of our own bodies were really justifiable the government might consider making poor quality alcohol very strong and cheap. Vodka induced stupor was highly effective at controlling the desperate in the Soviet Union. But, as that awful practice demonstrates, such dictatorial meddling in the private realm is incompatible with freedom. “Liberty is precious — so precious that it must be rationed,” as Vladimir Illyich Lenin, that rigid totalitarian, put it.

His is the freedom crippling instinct behind Scotland’s mounting political and medical crusade to restrict alcohol consumption. Unless it is stopped the outcome is absolutely predictable. From a philosophically bankrupt perspective it is easy to imagine that swingeing taxes on drink will eliminate or reduce drunken violence.

In fact such fiscal bullying will prove no more practical than the old notion that taxes on cigarettes would eliminate smoking. We tried that for half a century after Sir Richard Doll proved the link with lung cancer. Then government imposed legislative controls. Taxation is the first step towards prohibition.

Protecting us from ourselves is simply what government does, now that it has abandoned great ideological imperatives. It must be reined in. A nation in which people obey orders about their private conduct cannot call itself free. No politician — or doctor — has the authority or wisdom to tell us otherwise.

Jenny Hjul is away

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