For breakfast yesterday morning I dispensed with the usual grapefruit juice and kedgeree and opted instead for a repast that recalled my 1980s youth: a bacon roll washed down with a couple of glasses of Buckfast tonic wine. When I was a student a few glasses of the red menace with its high caffeine content was just the job for writing essays while suffering from sleep deprivation.

Often too it was the ideal party-starter when we didn't have enough money to get acclimatised in the pub. A bottle of this past your screech took you to a level that could only otherwise be achieved by the purchase of four pints of Guinness.

My re-acquaintance with the Coatbridge commotion lotion was not an unpleasant one. It has a deep mahogany hue and while not as easy on the nose as a decent beaujolais there is a fruity insinuation that lingers, even if it suggests prune rather than elderberry. The palate is not as unkempt as the critics would have you believe – there are cherries in there somewhere – and the finish is a tidy one which seems to curl around the thorax. In Scotland in recent years though, it has been blamed for so many social ills that they will soon be reviving our old witchcraft laws to banish it from the kingdom. I, on the other hand, cannot recommend it highly enough.

Its makers, the 16 Benedictine monks of Buckfast Abbey in Devon, along with their selling agents, are probably the most responsible purveyors of alcohol in the entire UK industry: their product does not feature in any drinks promotions; at around £7 a bottle it isn't cheap and there is no advertising. All that it has to commend itself is a handsome green livery with an eye-catching yellow label. Thereafter, it is purely word of mouth. The drink makes a profit of around £1m a year, all of which is spent on charitable projects. It amounts to less than 0.5% of all alcohol sold in Scotland.

You always know though, when the police and politicians in Scotland are feeling guilty about their failure to tackle crime and social deprivation: they simply blame it all on the Buckfast. In the last few years its makers have been blamed for virtually all crime that occurs in Lanarkshire. Attention-deficit disorder; stunted growth; scurvy, rickets and Scotland's repeated failure to qualify for the World Cup must all, it seems, be taken into consideration too. It is all nonsense and stems from the lack of political will properly to address the real reasons behind poverty and social breakdown. It's far easier for them and an increasingly lazy, reactionary and overbearing police force to demonise the Buckfast, thus conveniently camouflaging their own failures.

Consider this piece of contumacious drivel, for instance, from Les Gray, former head of the Scottish Police Federation. "Buckfast, refuse, point blank, to take any responsibility for the antisocial behaviour that's caused by the distribution and the consumption of Buckfast." Mr Gray's time might be better served exploring the issues of anti-Catholic sectarianism and violence against the miners in 1984 which have swirled around his own force for generations. For the sake of transparency it might be better for him to demand that all of Scotland's police officers declare membership of any secret organisations.

Last week, the head of Buckfast Abbey, Abbot David Charlesworth, was forced to address the increasingly ridiculous campaign by the police and politicians. "We don't make a product for it to be abused. That's not the idea," said Abbot Charlesworth. "We make a product which is a tonic wine. It annoys me to think that these problems, the social deprivation of an area of Scotland, are being put on our doorstep." He might have added that tonic wine has been a staple of west of Scotland revelry for more than a century. There have been many other brands but Buckfast simply possesses more depth and character than some of the dishwater that besmirches tables in the Chardonnay estates.

The police's role in this campaign is part of something bigger and more sinister. In recent years too they have taken advantage of an absence of leadership in the Justice Department to wage war on supporters of Celtic and Rangers through the Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications (Scotland) Act 2012. Young men in Glasgow's poorest districts have been subject to Stasi levels of intimidation and a wholesale presumption of guilt for singing off-colour songs and being unpleasant to each other.

The politicians who dreamt up this piece of judicial nonsense have effectively allowed the chief of Scotland's new single police force to become the country's unelected justice minister. Rather than undertake a serious strategy in those deprived neighbourhoods where sectarianism and poverty and violence reside they are happy to hide behind the baton charges and the kettling of a police force which more and more resembles an out-of-control private army for the chattering classes.

Yet this same police force seems incapable of protecting young women in Scotland's cities from being sexually assaulted at weekends. Figures released last month show that rapes and sexual assaults, especially in Glasgow, now outnumber robberies in Scotland. These are shocking figures and show that neither we nor Police Scotland are taking violence against women seriously enough. Any time now Police Scotland will be blaming it on excess consumption of Buckfast. It's less time-consuming to target adolescent youths for singing about Bobby Sands and Derry's Walls and taking flags to football matches.

In working-class communities Margaret Thatcher's crusade against the miners saw entire communities left to wither and die with no alternative investment. Social housing was phased out and many of the people who lived in them were erased from the memory banks of corporate UK. Lanarkshire lost Ravenscraig, Scotland's last steel manufacturer and the promises of new jobs and new lives failed to materialise as people realised how worthless a Labour vote was in those areas.

Alcohol-related crime and illness had taken root in these places long before the police started to become obsessed with Buckfast.