Jean McMillan 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇬🇧🇳🇿🇮🇪🇨🇦🇺🇸

15 years ago, we made prescriptions free in Scotland - while people south of the border pay £9.90 an item. For as long as the SNP is in government, we will always protect free prescriptions. On May 7th, vote SNP.

There’s something almost tragic about this, and not in the theatrical sense, but in the slow, grinding way truth gets buried under policy slogans until reality forces it back to the surface. Because what you’re looking at there isn’t just a newspaper headline. It’s a reckoning. Last year, residents were told they were exaggerating. That what they were seeing with their own eyes, the disorder, the theft, the anti social behaviour, was somehow “misinformation”. That word has become a kind of moral silencer, hasn’t it. A way of dismissing lived experience when it becomes inconvenient to the narrative. And now here we are. The figures don’t whisper. They shout. Crime nearly doubling. Violent incidents up. Theft up. Hundreds of reports in the immediate vicinity. You don’t need to be a statistician to see the pattern. You just need the honesty to admit it. This is the deeper problem. It’s not only about whether a facility works or doesn’t. It’s about what happens when institutions lose the courage to tell the truth early. When concerns are dismissed not because they’re wrong, but because they are politically awkward. Residents weren’t spreading misinformation. They were doing what communities have always done at their best. They were bearing witness. And instead of being listened to, they were managed. That’s the word I keep coming back to. Managed. Not heard. Not engaged. Not respected. Managed. There’s a moral cost to that. Catholic social teaching would call it a failure of subsidiarity. Decisions made far from the people who must live with the consequences, and then imposed with a kind of technocratic certainty that brooks no dissent. And when dissent comes anyway, it gets labelled. But reality has a way of breaking through ideology. It always does. You can only suppress truth for so long before it starts showing up in police reports, ambulance callouts, and headlines like this. And here’s the hard truth that nobody wants to say out loud. If a policy cannot tolerate scrutiny from the very people it affects, it’s not robust policy. It’s theatre. The question now isn’t whether residents were right. They were. The real question is whether anyone in authority has the humility to admit it, and more importantly, the courage to change course. Because if they don’t, this won’t be the last headline. It’ll just be the first one they can’t explain away.

Cllr Casey, how dare you accuse your own constituents the very people living with the daily consequences of this political experiment of spreading “disinformation”? Were you even in the room tonight in the Calton? Because I was. And I listened the residents, ordinary hard working-class people, pensioners, mothers, recovering addicts tell us in raw, often tearful detail that they are terrified to walk their own streets. That they are finding human faeces on their steps. That their doors are being rattled by drug dealers. That they’re scared to take their kids out, or even walk to the bingo. Are they all liars? Are they all “gaslighting” themselves? Or is it simply easier for you to ignore them, dismiss them, and defend a project you backed from the start no matter how catastrophic the fallout? You claim reports show “crime is down” which reports? Show them. Because the only thing going down in this community is public trust in elected officials who seem more interested in salvaging political narratives than confronting on the-ground reality. You talk about saving lives and of course, we all want that. But reviving someone from an overdose today only to watch them overdose again tomorrow isn’t saving lives. It’s prolonging suffering. It’s crisis management on repeat, not recovery." What about the young man who stood up tonight and told the room that all he’s being offered is more methadone, or diamorphine when what he wants is freedom from drugs? or the mother who's begging for her son to get rehab ? This isn't harm reduction, it's community abandonment wrapped in a press release. You are not just dismissing complaints. You are silencing people who are living in fear, grief and exhaustion. That is not leadership. That is cowardice. If you had even a shred of humility, you’d stop tweeting and start listening.

Just picked up my Granny's prescription there, 6 bags all free, if she stayed in England she would be dead, thanks to the SNP for that.🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🙄🤣