Calum Miller

This is what managed decline looks like when it’s dressed up as concern. Six billion pounds. Let that sit for a second. Not a rounding error, not a line in a budget, but the price tag of a system that has quietly made peace with failure. And still, the language is careful, polite, almost apologetic. “The price of inaction is too high.” No. The price of this action is already catastrophic. You’ve got rising deaths, the worst rate in Europe, billions drained from the public purse, and what’s the response? More of the same. More process. More programmes. More carefully worded sentences about “widening access” while the outcomes move in the wrong direction. This is the part no one wants to say out loud. If your strategy costs billions, produces worse results year on year, and still calls itself progress, it’s not a strategy. It’s a belief system. And belief systems don’t respond to evidence, they absorb it. “Drug harms are avoidable,” the report says. Quite right. But only if you’re willing to confront the uncomfortable truth that managing addiction is not the same as treating it, and stabilising chaos is not the same as restoring a life. Instead, we get theatre. Consumption rooms presented as solutions, naloxone handed out like a long-term plan, and an entire ecosystem of organisations whose survival depends on the crisis never actually ending. And here’s the sting in the tail. The real cost isn’t six billion. That’s just the number you can print. The real cost is the quiet decision, made over years, that some people will never recover, and that the best we can do is keep them alive just long enough to count them in next year’s statistics. You don’t spend six billion pounds a year because the problem is unsolvable. You spend it because you’ve stopped trying to solve it. Instead, we have built an entire architecture that can explain failure, fund failure, and survive failure, but cannot end it. The tragedy here is not just the deaths, though God knows that is enough. It is the shrinking of our moral ambition. We have gone from believing people can recover, to hoping they survive, to quietly planning around the assumption that many never will. If that is the settlement, then let’s at least be honest about it. But don’t call it progress. Don’t call it evidence-led. And for heaven’s sake, don’t call it compassionate. Because real compassion does not lower the bar to meet despair. It raises people out of it.

John Swinney downgraded the results of working class kids during the pandemic. We need a new government that will back them.

'This idea that I became obsessed to the exclusion of everything else is just a nonsense thing that some of my opponents say' 👇

There’s a definite sense this morning that Spring has finally arrived in East Lothian.

Tonight will be a bad night for the Gulf Iran will retaliate hard for the strikes on their largest gas field

He wants to deploy UK forces we don’t have to keep oil and gas flowing 3,000 miles away but forbids any new investment in our sector of the North Sea. Bonkers.

To the 1 in 30 folk in Scotland and 1 in 6 workers in Aberdeen who work in the oil and gas sector, you should know this: Reform is on your side.