A man and his sister prepare to take matters into their own hands. Colin McInnes, who is autistic, and his sister, who is in early recovery from addiction, make their way into the city center carrying a rucksack with a flask of lentil soup, a sandwich, and some broken bourbon biscuits inside. Colin’s aim is modest: to feed one hungry homeless person.

Little did he know that this small act of compassion would change the course of his entire life and the lives of countless others. As Colin turns to walk home with the empty rucksack, one street-dweller taps him on the shoulder and asks if he will be back. “I will,” he said. “I’ll be here at this time every night.”

Six years later, homelessness is only worsening, and this winter, Glasgow is as cold as ever. Thankfully, though, Colin has been busy. Inside the headquarters of his Homeless Project Scotland (HPS) — the result of the promise made on that cold night — 40 or so people are eating hot meals in a warm café. Sustained entirely by volunteers and public donations and operating without government funding, it provides food, shelter, emergency response and advocacy seven days a week. Every meal, bed and item of clothing here is paid for through public donations, and the quiet support of nearby businesses. At the back of the building, in a glass-fronted office, a man with a 1,000-yard stare chairs a meeting. It’s Colin.

The challenge facing him is acute. Across the UK, the scale of homelessness now runs into the hundreds of thousands. Shelter’s latest analysis shows that at least 382,000 people in England were homeless on a given day in 2025 — including many families stuck in temporary accommodation. Official government statistics show 132,410 households in temporary accommodation in England alone, and Shelter has calculated that there are as many as 100,000 children in temporary accommodation in London alone. To put that another way, one out of every 21 children in London is homeless, equivalent to more than one homeless child per class.

Taken together, these figures underline how pervasive housing insecurity has become, extending far beyond rough sleeping into widespread reliance on emergency and temporary housing. These trends reflect deeper structural pressures: a chronic shortage of genuinely affordable housing, spiraling private rents, insecure tenancies, and a welfare system reformed in ways that leave little margin for error when people hit crisis.

Westminster recently set out a new plan to prevent homelessness and rough sleeping, backed by £3.5 billion in promised investment. Yet critics argue that without a major expansion of social housing and meaningful action on poverty and insecurity, little will change.

Another factor worsening the crisis is dysfunction across the system itself. Research by Shelter has repeatedly shown how stretched resources at local level create avoidable delays to vulnerable people getting the support they need. This failure is often chalked up to the chaotic lives of the homeless as opposed to services arguably unfit for purpose. People with complex needs face specific challenges. Homeless Link’s Unhealthy State of Homelessness research found that 82% of people experiencing homelessness have a mental health diagnosis, but only 9% of accommodation providers state they are capable of supporting people them. They may be judged too risky for mainstream services, while rigid thresholds, poorly integrated services, and turgid referral systems delay timelier intervention. Public misunderstanding compounds the problem, allowing homelessness to be framed as inevitable, insoluble, or the fault of feckless individuals, relieving political pressure for meaningful change.

Suggested reading

Can Britain escape its housing trap?

By Peter Apps

Homeless Project Scotland is determined to change this. The charity represents a radical communitarian response to these traditional systems, many of which have grown overly cautious to intervene in a climate of scarce resources and institutional ass-covering. Powered by working-class volunteers with little experience of, or interest in, navigating bureaucracy, the project is driven by a palpable sense of moral urgency and a clear message to homeless people: if services won’t help you, we will.

Colin describes that night in Glasgow in 2019 as “something like Armageddon”. And what followed, he tells me, was not a plan but a series of improvised and messy responses to escalating need. He acted swiftly on the impulse to help so many of us feel but resist. Rucksacks became crates. Crates became a battered trailer dragged through the snow under Central Station Bridge. Food was cooked and reheated wherever possible. “We didn’t care about any legalities,” Colin says. “Just caring about humanity. Get it done and feed people.”

Word spread. Soon, Colin’s team was feeding hundreds. Then Covid hit. As other services shut down and staff were furloughed, Homeless Project Scotland kept going. “We were the only place providing food in the city center,” Colin says. “The whole city just became empty.” Eventually the operation was paused, not because demand fell, but because gathering together in the streets became unsafe.

What followed was even more ambitious. Volunteers cooked in their own homes, met in supermarket car parks and delivered food daily to hotels across the city where the homeless had been lodged during the pandemic. “We took out thousands and thousands of meals,” Colin says.

Made up of volunteers operating off their own backs and running mainly off proceeds from collection buckets passed around local pubs, HPS lacked a formal structure. When it was time to upscale, crowdfunders were launched and more volunteers signed up. In the absence of a professional PR operation, accusations of poor governance found easy purchase — and Colin applied to become a registered charity. “I wanted to be above board,” he says. “I wanted to show everybody where the books were.”

He also needed a premises. First, he persuaded a landlord to let him take over a disused property in a collapsing rat-infested building. After a letter to Network Rail — owner of a vacant retail unit beneath Central Station bridge in the heart of the city center — an Argyle Street office came next. Then, the current base on Glassford Street on the doorstep of Glasgow’s upmarket Merchant City. “We kept thinking: ‘This is too big,’” Colin says. “And then before you know it, that TARDIS got filled.”

Today the organization runs what Colin describes as the only fully volunteer-led night shelter in Scotland, alongside a food service producing tens of thousands of meals a month and a volunteer-run national helpline operating around the clock. People call in with all kinds of problems, from loneliness to hypothermia to domestic violence.

Colin is unapologetic about the absence of professional sheen that some apparently mistake for unseriousness. “Bureaucracy can fuck right off,” he says. “You will never fund my charity for a bureaucracy.”

What guides the organization instead is a simpler principle: people before procedure. It’s a principle as risky as it is provocative. Colin traces his distrust of rigid systems back to personal experience rather than ideology. “My approach is shaped entirely by lived experience,” he explains. “I am someone who has suffered at the hands of systems that were meant to protect, support, and care and which clearly failed to do so. That experience gave me a deep understanding of how easily people fall through the cracks and how invisible they can become.”

We take a break. I step out for a cigarette and get talking to a man named Andy. When Andy first contacted Homeless Project Scotland, he wasn’t in Glasgow. He was in Blackpool; after a period of poor decisions, his marriage had broken down and he’d become estranged from his children. Desperate, he phoned the helpline. Instead of receiving advice, a referral, or a soul-destroying automated message, as he might have done if he’d rung any other hotline, Andy got talking to Colin. Colin jumped in a van and drove south through the night. “He came down and picked me up from Blackpool,” Andy says. Within days, he was in the shelter. After three months, he moved into a hotel. Now, he has a furnished flat and is being assessed for a two-bedroom home so his children can visit.

Andy had tried accessing services before and “got nowhere”. If it wasn’t for Colin and the project, he says, “I think I would have committed suicide.” Andy now volunteers seven days a week.

On this brutally cold evening, the shelter is filling quietly. People queue in a seated area, are then greeted by name and guided through a process that is firm without being intimidating. There is no performative authority, no sense of suspicion. The atmosphere is strangely serene.

The dormitories are warm and well-ordered. Each bed is numbered. The system is meticulous rather than bureaucratic. If someone in bed eight gets unwell, staff can immediately access their medical information. There are showers, toilets, laundry facilities and a kitchen area in the shelter. There is a small cinema corner and a few well-stocked bookshelves. Bedding is high quality, supplied by the same company that services the boutique hotel next door. People here are not offered platitudes about “dignity” then fobbed off until Monday morning; rather, they’re treated with care and respect.

In creating such a sanctuary, Colin has come up against many of the computer-says-no types prevalent in officialdom; the kind of people who are so inured to the dysfunction of the sector that they no longer perceive it let alone raise their voices against it. As a result, his antenna for local authority bullshit is extremely well tuned. In a video posted by the project earlier this year, Colin explained that Glasgow City Council had refused him a planning application for a shelter on the grounds that people would queue outside the building for food, a decision he contrasted with the tolerance shown for lines of rowdy revelers outside nearby nightclubs.

Suggested reading

The rise of California's vanlords

By Matt Feeney

The project experiences a fair amount of resistance locally, Colin tells me, much of it framed in the language of health and safety. Risks are identified, concerns are flagged, and safeguards are invoked. In theory, these mechanisms exist to protect the vulnerable. In practice, Colin argues, they are often used to obstruct help at the moment it is most urgently needed. Fire safety was repeatedly cited as a reason not to act, even as people slept outdoors in lethal conditions. At the same time, “shared-air” sleeping spaces were dismissed as undignified, despite the alternative being a doorway in sub-zero temperatures. The contradiction is not lost on him. “The lengths that the SNP-led council and SNP government have gone to in order to defend the position that night shelters are ‘a thing of the past’ are extraordinary,” he says. “This is not about policy, ideology, or box-ticking. This is about life and death. When the choice is a warm, supervised indoor space or sleeping outside in sub-zero temperatures, the moral answer should be obvious.”

To Colin, this all reveals a risk-averse system more comfortable managing hypothetical threats than confronting immediate harm. Worse, he believes that bureaucracy has become a way for institutions to distance themselves from moral responsibility. When procedures are followed but people still freeze, starve or die, process becomes a means of deflection. The absurdities don’t stop there: each time someone is forced to sleep rough, the local authority is in breach of its own statutory duties — yet faces no penalty. In effect, the biggest rule-breaker is left enforcing the rules on everyone else.

By contrast, safety in this shelter is not ignored, it is simply understood differently. “We don’t have time for sitting writing policies,” Colin says. “People are coming in here in an emergency.”

Emergency is not overselling it. The situation in Glasgow is bleak. Official Scottish Government data shows Glasgow accounted for 43% of reports of rough sleeping in Scotland in 2024-25, far higher than other local authority areas. Independent counts by agencies like Simon Community Scotland regularly find around 25-30 people sleeping rough in the city on a given night (the real number is likely higher), illustrating the visibility and persistence of the problem. On a good night, Homeless Project Scotland will still be forced to turn people away because the shelter is at full capacity. The fact it is so oversubscribed demonstrates its direct impact; if it closed, rough sleeping numbers would rise overnight.

This is clearly not a service designed around political correctness. It is a response moving at a pace the homelessness crisis demands. What distinguishes it is not just the services it provides, but how it innovates in the face of administrative gridlock. Despite being run entirely by working-class volunteers, it is a model for what support for homeless people should look like in the 21st century. And while traditional systems have a lot to learn from the project, it’s likely it will inspire more radicalism outside the sector — and continued resentment within it.

While Colin believes his presence is an irritant to leaders both local and national, he has seen interest from politicians looking to capitalize on what is regarded by many as SNP complacency. The shelter has recently drawn visits from both Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar and Reform UK councillor Audrey Dempsey, no doubt on charm offensives ahead of Scottish Parliament elections in May. For now, Colin appears wary of political proximity, conscious that attention can just as easily dilute the message as strengthen it, and that keeping power at a safe distance may be essential to the project’s integrity. In truth, Colin, like many great social campaigners, thinks and talks just like a politician. It’s where his loyalty currently lies that ultimately distinguishes him.

I think again about Andy’s story as we walk back upstairs. Had his call been logged, deferred, or redirected to office hours, he might not be here at all. In a system where delay is too often presented as necessary due process, Homeless Project Scotland operates on a simpler moral principle: when someone is in crisis, you go to them. You do not ask them to wait. It’s a principle we could all learn from.

We also need reflection that condemns violence without slipping into mythmaking. Because alongside the horror of what happened, there is also the reality of who Kirk was and what he stood for.

Kirk’s Christian convictions were, I believe, sincerely held, as was his commitment to free speech. He would, no doubt, hate the idea of people being fired from their job for reacting bluntly (or even cruelly) to his death. But history is already being rewritten in the rush to memorialize him. To claim that many of his positions on race, gender, and religion were not on the furthest edge of the conservative spectrum is either pure denial, or evidence of how ideas once thought relics of the past have steadily crept back into the mainstream.

So, what did Kirk actually believe? When we look at his positions across a range of issues, the picture is clear enough — and it’s far from moderate. He insisted the “Great Replacement” — a far-Right conspiracy theory — was real. He dismissed the Civil Rights Movement as “a huge mistake”. He expressed suspicion of black professionals, painted Muslims as a civilizational threat, and repeated antisemitic tropes about Jewish influence. On gun violence, he argued mass shootings were a necessary price for the Second Amendment — scant comfort to families who have lost children in classrooms. On abortion, he said he would force his 10-year-old daughter to carry a pregnancy to term even if she was raped. That these views are widely held in the US makes them no less hard-line.

His supporters might mount spirited defenses of Kirk’s views on race or culture or guns, in an attempt to portray him more favorably. For others in the hard-Right ecosystem, his refusal to condemn homosexuals in the most extreme terms may have marked him ‘’moderate’’ by contrast. It’s when we turn to his positions on constitutional questions that ludicrous claims Kirk was simply a center-right provocateur truly collapse.

Suggested reading

Will Trump destroy the Left?

By Aris Roussinos

Hosting a Trump rally in Georgia in October 2024, Kirk told the 10,000-strong crowd, “This is a Christian state. I’d like to see it that way.” Kirk’s embrace of Christian nationalism shows his politics were far from middle-of-the-road. Once willing to affirm the constitutional safeguard of church–state separation, he later dismissed it as a “myth” and argued that America should be governed by Christian values. He endorsed theocratic ideas like the “Seven Mountains Mandate” — a doctrine holding that Christians must seize control of the seven key spheres of society (government, education, media, arts, business, family, religion) to establish dominion. Kirk understood that the rise of Trumpism presented a unique opportunity to challenge secular, pluralist governance, and in 2021 established Turning Point Faith — a branch of his organization designed to mobilize churches and pastors, explicitly fusing evangelical activism with Right-wing politics.

In a free country, Kirk had the right to think, say and do all of this — but make no mistake: this was not center-right conservatism but the language and strategy of the Christian hard-Right. Some will insist he was not “far-Right,” reserving that label for Klan robes and open fascists. But narrowing of the term is just as dangerous as overusing it and ignores how far-Right politics have softened their aesthetic and slipped into the mainstream. The reluctance to embrace the label reflects not moderation, but Kirk’s talent for laundering radical views as common sense — most of it on campus, where his charisma and quick wit turned sparring into theatre.

He could pivot from combative to compassionate, sharp-edged to endearing, blurring the line between persuasion and performance. One example came in an exchange with a non-binary student. Kirk advised them to be very careful about medication and urged them to aspire to be comfortable with the body they were born with. Even if some would regard this as transphobic, the tone of the encounter was nonetheless marked by a degree of empathy — complicating the portrait of him as a purely hateful figure. On YouTube, however, what endured were the highlight-reel victories — clips of nervous students being “owned”, often edited for maximum impact — giving him an aura of intellectual dominance. His debating style was less open-ended than it seemed: more like rehearsed routines, polished through repetition, not unlike ‘’crowd work’’ in comedy. A student might think they had mounted a devastating challenge, only to discover Kirk had answered the same question dozens of times before.

Kirk was reminiscent of a bullish Christopher Hitchens during the heyday of the New Atheist movement, when he toured the Bible Belt turning priests and rabbis into cannon fodder for the entertainment of the crowd. Hitchens fans will bristle at the comparison — and rightly, because Hitchens’s intellect and rhetorical ferocity would likely have torn Kirk apart — but the performance element was strikingly similar. And like Hitchens, Kirk thrived on YouTube, cultivating a cult-like following that congratulated itself on intellectual seriousness while rarely subjecting its hero’s arguments to genuine scrutiny. On the rare occasions when Kirk faced seasoned opponents, such as his bruising exchange with a Cambridge Union feminist, the mask slipped: the charm gave way to petulance, and the performance faltered.

Kirk’s campus appearances should be seen for what they often were: set-pieces, not robust, open-ended exchanges of ideas. To present him now as the lone arbiter of free exchange in this context is also misleading and does a disservice to many of his opponents.

More from this author

Will Kneecap sell out?

By Darren McGarvey

A convenient narrative has taken hold: that the very campuses where Kirk made his name as a debater are now hotbeds of censorship and proof of democratic decay. Sadly, this narrative is not entirely baseless. Yet while some students tried and failed to block his appearances, just as many chose to engage him. His fame rested in part on their willingness to argue back, even when the playing field was heavily tilted in his favor.

A central plank of the conservative strategy is to caricature the Left as irredeemably “woke” and incapable of reasoned debate. Kirk understood that nowhere was this easier to stage than on campus, where students brimmed with confidence but often lacked experience or composure. By turning their faltering challenges into “lib-owning” theater, he not only polished his own reputation but reinforced a broader narrative of progressive fragility — a tactic that displayed his undeniable political intelligence.

For many disaffected young people, conservatives like Kirk and Jordan Peterson before him provided catharsis: the thrill of watching “snowflakes” get their comeuppance. What began as entertainment soon became an entry point into conservatism, which, compared to the rigid, doctrinaire tone of online activism, felt warmer and more welcoming. While the Right isn’t quite the easy-going broad-church of ideas it likes to claim, a solidarity can develop between hardline conservatives and disaffected liberals, who find common cause in their contempt for the “Left’’. In this context, genuine concern about free speech becomes the hard-Right’s primary youth recruitment tool.

Kirk’s talent was to veil extreme Right-wing views many Americans would find abhorrent, behind that moderate aesthetic: the suit, the charm, the affable style. Conservatives in his mold rose not through the force of their arguments alone, but by capitalizing on a Left that had grown intellectually complacent and morally self-satisfied — a strategic opening Kirk was quick to seize.

But the project was clear — to normalize ideas that, only a decade earlier, would have been recognized as hard-Right, reactionary, and deeply consequential for women and minorities if written into law.

Where Tyler Robinson, the young man accused of killing Kirk, fits into this story remains murky. But whatever his political beliefs, America’s ideological obsession with firearms — an obsession Kirk shared — clearly played a decisive role in this tragedy. Photographs have already surfaced of Robinson as a child, posing with an array of high-powered weapons. Culturally, he had been exposed to mass shootings countless times before he ever became politically engaged. He knew the grim fame that comes with such spectacles — a uniquely American notoriety.

Armed only with extreme beliefs, Robinson would likely have been just another troubled young man mouthing off into the void of the internet. It’s dishonest and cowardly of many on the Right to cast Kirk as a martyr to intellectual fearlessness while, at the same time, minimizing or dismissing this point.

Progressives should welcome honest conversation about the role Leftist ideologies may have played in this horrifying event. It remains to be seen whether this latest outburst of political violence in the US will prompt conservatives to reexamine their love affair with firearms. I somehow doubt it will. But we will find out whether the commitment to so-called free speech amounts to anything more than free speech for those they agree with — given how many US conservatives, Trump included, are now waging a very Christian brand of cancel culture in the wake of this tragedy.

Kirk once remarked that “you can tell a lot about a person by how they react when someone dies”. Now, in the wake of his own assassination, we face the same test: whether to respond with denial, mythmaking, or glee — or to condemn the violence plainly while refusing to launder the politics he championed.

Krykant spent the last five years of his life campaigning for radical drug reform. His activism went beyond his previous calls for clean needles, safe spaces to inject, and softer-touch policing. Krykant, in the end, became something of an extremist, envisioning a world where addiction carried no stigma whatsoever; where the identity of “drug-user” could be worn with pride; and where obtaining and using powerful, addictive psychoactive substances was a simple matter of equality carrying no social or legal penalties. But he hadn’t always been that way. Something changed over the years, as his activist star soared. While many have already attempted to sum up Krykant’s legacy, as an intelligent and energetic campaigner, he was far more complex than that. 

His life story was, and still is, compelling. A former addict who had once been on the streets, hospitalized with psychosis in his teens, he turned his life around. He secured a job, a family and a global community of friends and fellowship. In other words, Krykant seemed to be flourishing, and this was in large part due to his abstinence-based recovery — when you eschew all mood- and mind-altering substances with an understanding that addiction is an illness. 

This contrasts with the prevailing treatment of harm-reduction which, among other things, involves managing addiction by prescribing less harmful substances or mitigating the health risks associated with using. Harm reduction saves and stabilizes countless lives every day, but for some with severe cases of long-term addiction, it becomes a form of purgatory. When an addict of this extreme variety buys into the idea that they can, in some circumstances, safely use drugs — whether prescribed by a doctor or obtained on the street — it’s only a matter of time before the blue lights start flashing. 

More by this author

Why Scotland can't get clean

By Darren McGarvey

What many people don’t know about Krykant, because he edited much of his history when he embraced the harm-reduction philosophy that made him famous, is that he spent 11 years sober before he became a campaigner. His journey can be traced on social media, from when he began working in support services while firmly rooted in the 12-step model. It was at the height of Scotland’s drug death crisis, in 2019, that Krykant felt called to do more — publicly. He aligned himself with “You Keep Talking, We Keep Dying”, a campaign spearheaded by Anne Marie Ward, CEO of campaigning charity Faces and Voices of Recover, to push for urgent reforms in drug treatment and policy. 

He turned up at Ward’s event in Glasgow, in a suit and tie and his finest game face. From the outset, those around him sensed that Peter was seeking not just policy change, but a highly visible platform from which to advocate for it. The long-deadlocked debate over safe consumption rooms offered him both. He sought, in his words, to move forward the “political football” on safe consumption, encouraging more thoughtful debate on the scourge of Scottish drug deaths — at that time and presently the worst in Europe.

As his campaigning grew, Krykant was likelier to be seen on the evening news than at the recovery meetings which had been the foundation of his sobriety. And in a bold, headline-grabbing move, he converted an old ambulance into a mobile drug-consumption facility, parking it on the streets of Glasgow and daring the authorities to intervene. The optics were powerful. But this wasn’t just a politically astute stunt: it was a heartfelt act of protest against inertia. Krykant argued that if official safe consumption sites weren’t allowed, then people were going to die wretchedly in alleyways, stairwells — or alone in their homes. 

His actions helped drag the issue into the political mainstream, forcing formerly suspicious tabloids to adopt a softer editorial tone on drug addicts. All this also earned Krykant international recognition. He became, in effect, the poster boy for harm reduction, an ally for canny operators across the harm-reduction space, always keen to publicize their work by platforming others who had “lived it”.

Peter Krykant’s activism, particularly his unsanctioned overdose prevention van, helped push Scotland toward officially piloting the UK’s first drug consumption room, reframing drug policy as a public health issue. His work legitimized lived-experience voices in policymaking, and accelerated national debate on harm reduction and decriminalization. Whatever your view on this issue, and there are many, nobody can ever take that away from him.

But — don’t I know it — this platform comes with risks. Those close to Krykant knew the truth: he had relapsed not long after launching his van, using the same drugs as the people he was trying to help. This was an open secret among politicians, charity workers, and journalists, as well as many of us in the recovery community. When dealing with addicts in relapse, it’s not always clear what the best course of action is.

The waters run all the muddier because addicts, by our very nature, become secretive and dishonest out of shame and fear. Krykant didn’t owe everyone every detail of his life. But having been put on a pedestal for his immense efforts, being honest about his own struggles would have been that much harder. The few who raised concerns, particularly from abstinence-based recovery communities, were dismissed as bitter, jealous, or out of step with the “progressive” mood. It felt almost taboo to publicly point out that Krykant was in danger, and even more futile to challenge him behind the scenes.

All the while, those close to Krykant watched as his ideology shifted from moderate to unhinged. I’d even argue that his addiction took his politics hostage: the more visible he became, the more absent he was in his private life and community. In the early days, he still spoke of the need for detox beds, for wider pathways into recovery, and for a more thoughtful debate about the role of medication and abstinence. But as Krykant started obsessing over harm reduction — and became more dependent on the organizations that affirmed his experiences — his outlook changed. He became part of what one former friend described as the “drugs pride” brigade: people who didn’t just advocate for safety and support, but who recast active addiction itself as a valid, even empowering identity. This is the sort of idea that only someone in active addiction could adopt, and only those with no experience of it could affirm.

As Krykant struggled to reconcile the painful, humbling backslide into addiction with his newfound prominence, his broader politics became stranger too. He ran as an independent candidate for the Scottish Parliament, and when that failed, he began aligning with voices who, if they had their way, would see town centers and city streets lined with vending machines dispensing heroin and Valium. He adopted the language of “People Who Use Drugs” (PWUD) and “Person Who Injects Drugs” (PWID) — monikers that reframed destructive, home-wrecking compulsions as informed lifestyle choices. He blocked critics, even friends, and built a social media echo chamber that only told him what he wanted, needed, to hear.

More by this author

The toxic trope of 'benefit scroungers'

By Darren McGarvey

Like it or not, Krykant’s best years were objectively spent in the rooms of 12-step fellowships. Yet he came not only to despise this method of sobriety, but to publicly condemn it and discourage others from trying it. This is a textbook relapse. In such a situation, the urge to create a face-saving justification for your descent back into addiction is strong. Krykant, sadly, had no shortage of backers willing to bolster whatever tall tale he required to justify his increasingly desperate circumstances. Along the way, he abandoned the belief system and community that had helped him stay clean for over a decade — a decision that would cost him his life.

Tributes have flowed since his death — from politicians, journalists, charities — each reaffirming the noble story: that Krykant battled for the marginalized, that he broke through political silence, that he cared. And all of that is true. But it is not the whole truth. These stories erase the part that matters most: the human cost of turning private pain into public performance, and the way a man who wanted to save lives slowly lost his own as his addiction became awkward for his gang of civic cheerleaders.

There are lessons here for everyone. For campaigners, a reminder of the dangers of building movements around individuals still in crisis. For journalists, a call to interrogate narratives rather than merely regurgitate them. For charities and funders, a warning against mistaking visibility for stability. And, for all of us, an invitation to tell more honest stories — about addiction, about recovery, and about the fine line between advocacy and exploitation.

Krykant’s legacy is assured, and he leaves Scotland’s drug debate in a far better place than he found it. While there was little we agreed towards the end, I was one of the people he reached out to for help when things took a bad turn a few years ago. And what he was pleading for back then was a rehab bed. He wanted to get sober. He understood what he suffered from and what he needed to get well. Along the way, though, something changed. Make of that what you will.

Krykant wanted so badly for his legacy to be about harm-reduction heroes and compassion for drug users. But what about those who amplified his message that using is a lifestyle choice — who encouraged his shift into activism and cast him as an expert on all things addiction while his private life collapsed? Did they show him real compassion and friendship of the sort that may occasionally involve a hard truth, some tough love, as opposed to vague platitudes and endless affirmation? Or did they exploit him, as a means to a political end, then run for cover when things headed south?

Luckily for them, but sadly for the rest of us, the whole truth likely died with Krykant. May he rest in peace. And may the rest hang their heads in shame.

Yet if the demands for accountability are only growing shriller, Kneecap’s story is nothing new. Once an artist moves from cult status into the mainstream, all while continuing to challenge accepted narratives, a reaction is sure to follow. Amid the apologies and the caveats, then, Kneecap now faces the same question as any radical artist on the precipice of stardom. Do you soften your edges for access, or hold your ground, and risk the establishment’s wrath?

In many ways, Kneecap’s difficulties feel specific to our cultural moment. The band has been accused of glorifying violence, of supporting Hamas and Hezbollah. These are charges they’ve denied. Either way, it comes as no surprise to me that this pro-Palestine, anti-government trio are in a bind. As a professional working in various capacities as a writer and performer, I can tell you right now that using your platform to either criticize Israel, or express solidarity with innocent Palestinians, comes with risks.

Suggested reading

Kneecap are the future of Northern Ireland

By Darran Anderson

I’ve been reported to the police for taking part in fundraisers for medics in the Gaza Strip. I’ve been accosted by a chief executive, and delegates at a conference, for using a keynote speech to urge a politically neutral organization to join calls for a ceasefire. Scheduled appearances were mysteriously canceled, and organizers have had to bulk up security in case protesters turn up.

The tensions Kneecap speak to arise not just from the strength of feeling around the war between Israel and Hamas, but the strong sense many of us have that our political class collaborates with major media players to stifle debate. It creates a culture whereby any criticism to the prevailing narrative — that anything Israel does is morally justified — becomes futile and where raising your voice against the systematic brutalization of innocent civilians in the Gaza Strip starts to feel dangerous.

In this context, then, Kneecap become a case study in how thought and speech are regimented — and, in the generalities anyway, it’s nothing new. Transgressive artists have long been made examples of and punished for their politics. Sinead O’Connor’s career was derailed after she tore up a photo of the Pope on Saturday Night Live, in protest of the Catholic Church’s abuse cover-ups. She was right, but she was ruined. The Dixie Chicks were boycotted, threatened and driven off country radio after criticizing the Iraq War. NWA had the FBI on their backs.

And so the list goes on. In every case, craven politicians join a growing media chorus of condemnation, rendering the acts in question too toxic to book. It’s the same story with Kneecap, with the very journalists who defend edgy comedians like Jimmy Carr and Ricky Gervais — and their right to say incredibly offensive things we all know are part of an act — now expecting us to believe Kneecap are some kind of quasi-paramilitary group.

Beyond the media outrage, meanwhile, Kneecap’s predicament ironically speaks to the band’s success and their clear desire to cross into the mainstream. That’s why we’ve seen statements issued and apologies offered — public relations maneuvers aimed at minimizing the commercial impact of negative coverage. Though the group certainly wish to retain their radical credentials, it’s also clear they’ve been pushed into a far more defensive position than they’re comfortable with, or indeed than their fans are used to.

For example, while the band has emphasized that it stands in solidarity with Palestinian civilians, and oppose Israel’s bombardment and occupation, they do not support militant Islamist organizations. Yet, such distinctions rarely matter once the wheels of the media outrage machine begin turning. The point is not to understand or debate Kneecap’s actual views, but to frame them as toxic enough that venues, festivals and collaborators all feel pressured to abandon them.

More from this author

Labour's ruthless raid on the sick

By Darren McGarvey

And though I loathe the confected outrage of many a blowhard on this issue, the wicked dilemma Kneecap now faces is arguably one of their own making. They’ve sold themselves as countercultural and gained a loyal global following as a result. This boxes them into a specific set of responses — none of them free of risk. By being seen to back down, even slightly, in the face of a concerted political and media effort to paint them as terrorist sympathizers, they risk alienating their core support, thus weakening the very leverage they have in the music industry. Alternatively, doubling down will effectively mean being blacklisted from major festivals and media outlets for the foreseeable future, even if they do at least retain their integrity and links to the fanbase.

Despite the calm collectedness the band and their manager are keen to paint, then, there’ll now be panic behind the scenes. And no wonder: life-changing opportunities are now on the line. Of course, for the group’s hardcore fanbase, the answer is simple: fight the power. But it’s never quite as simple as “stand your ground” versus “sell out”.

As creatives, we hope to have our cakes and eat them too. We want the visibility, the critical acclaim, and the big performance fees. But we also want to be seen as unwavering in our principles, and unscrupulous in pursuit of artistic integrity. Once a radical act begins to gain traction beyond pub open-mics — when a wider audience starts paying attention — everything changes. The decisions get heavier. The risks get real. And that visibility, often romanticized from the outside, can be extremely stressful. A lot of radical artists don’t plan for this moment. It comes as a shock. They’re propelled into a space they never expected to inhabit, and they arrive carrying principles that don’t always map neatly onto the pressures and expectations that follow.

Suddenly, the stakes aren’t just ideological. As Kneecap is doubtless now discovering, livelihoods are involved: your own, your partner’s, your kids’. You’ve got a label to deal with. You’ve got tour managers, stage crew, new fans, and media people around you, many of whom have very different values and priorities. The freedom to just steamroll your way through, to say “to hell with it all”— that becomes much harder to exercise when other people depend on your success to pay their bills. And despite their rebellious aesthetics, bands like Kneecap are professionals with aspirations of their own, not least a desire to be financially secure.

And, especially for a group from West Belfast, when someone from your community finally breaks through, there’s often a silent burden to carry: represent us, but don’t get it wrong or you’ll have hell to pay. Kneecap didn’t ask to be role models or political lightning rods. They came up from a place where art, humor, trauma, and resistance blur together. West Belfast isn’t a backdrop: it’s the very soil they grew out of. Their use of the Irish language isn’t decorative, it’s an act of cultural reclamation, an assertion of identity in a postcolonial context that still cuts deep. Their solidarity with Palestine comes from that same instinct: to back those being brutalized by a far more powerful force.

Ultimately, then, Kneecap will have to decide what matters more: global recognition in a fickle, spineless industry, or holding true to their principles. If you want to be mainstream, you have to make sacrifices, and few acts can have it both ways. Even Eminem went pop eventually. Unrelenting scrutiny comes with any public platform. Kneecap exercises their freedom of speech to say what they believe, but there are always consequences to raising your head above the parapet. Other people will exercise theirs to condemn, marginalize and punish. That’s the way free speech works.

Artists won’t always get it right, and when they do fuck up, it’s appropriate that they should acknowledge their mistakes. Integrity comes not just from staying true to our beliefs, but also from admitting when we’ve crossed a line. We’ve all said and done stupid and offensive things. In the end, though, that’s not the issue. The issue is that, as a result of expressing views about Israel regarded as controversial — but which are in fact entirely mainstream — Kneecap now has every editor in the country instructing hacks to trawl through every lyric, every interview and every act of public flatulence, looking for proof these guys are something they aren’t.

Who knows what Kneecap will do next. I don’t envy their plight. But I do know this: the system rewards outrage only when it can be commodified. It tolerates rebellion as long as it’s aesthetic. The moment your politics cut too close to the bone, you’ll find out just how tolerant the liberal cultural sphere really is, and who your friends really are.

The system is broken, according to our Work and Pensions minister, because of the vast numbers of long-term ill claiming welfare payments. Her quick fix to the deep-rooted problem of chronic illness, disability, and NHS waiting lists longer than all three volumes of Das Kapital, is a gentle shove down your wheelchair ramp, into the nearest zero-hours contract. It’s unoriginal, impersonal, schizophrenic policy. But for Kendall, it’s the greatest shake-up of the benefits system in a decade.

Rather than helping the sick and the mentally unwell into work — by, say, guaranteeing access to quality healthcare, or supporting people with those disabilities to find suitable and sustainable employment — Kendall will simply change the definitions of what it means to be sick and mentally unwell. Under her plans, the “Limited Capability for Work or Work-Related Activity” category will be scrapped, meaning thousands of people currently deemed too ill to work will soon find themselves employable by government decree. Never mind the fact that the health system is in crisis, and many can’t access the care they need to get better. Never mind the reality that employers aren’t exactly queuing up to hire workers with complex health conditions. Labour has decided that, rather than fixing these systemic problems, the real issue is that not enough sick people are dragging themselves to Jobcentres for mandatory CV workshops.

It’s hard to decide what’s more ridiculous: the idea that forcing the sick into job searches will somehow heal them, or the sheer bureaucratic madness of trying to implement this policy through the already broken DWP. If the DWP were a person, it would be convicted of manslaughter, signed off indefinitely, and committed to a mental institution for life — before declaring itself fit to work on its own deathbed. This is a department that can’t answer its own phones, subjects legitimate claimants to months of appeals processes, and, in one notable case, flagged over 200,000 people for potential fraud investigations — wrongly. Now they’re about to be trusted to decide whether someone with severe chronic pain or debilitating mental illness is fit to stack shelves for $10 an hour? What could possibly go wrong?

There was a time when the only tools this Stanford experiment had at its disposal to force compliance consisted mainly of sternly worded computer-generated letters and a telephone help-line with a two-hour queue. To Vivaldi. Well, now the DWP means business — and it’s going to feel extremely personal. Of course welfare should be reserved for those who need it, and genuine fraud must be stamped out and deterred. But I question the wisdom and character of anyone who thinks disability benefit is the area of welfare most in need of an aggressive audit. Invariably, the populations government targets with these cost-saving reforms are those who lack the means or the will to fight back — plus they’re easier to harass than wealthy tax dodgers.

According to the DWP, fraud and error cost the taxpayer $9.7 billion last year, with $7.4 billion classified as outright fraud. It’s an interesting term, fraud. It implies that every last penny of those billions has been deliberately scammed. But mistakes are inevitable in an overly complex, inflexible system which bamboozles even university-educated claimants who inadvertently get a detail here or there wrong. Compare that with the $23 billion in benefits that go unclaimed every year, and the story looks very different. This move isn’t just about clawing back public money and cutting the welfare bill; it’s about taking an aggressive posture. A posture designed to appease those whose overriding response to decades of economic mismanagement and stagnation is to demand that the poorest and least fortunate are held responsible. Labour is far less interested in ensuring people get the help they’re entitled to than it is in stoking a moral panic about fraudsters bleeding the system dry.

So, not content with trousering your granny’s heating allowance and psychologically waterboarding the legitimately sick and disabled, Labour is now aiming to turn the DWP into a pound-shop paramilitary force. Sweeping new reforms will give officers the power to enter and search homes, seize property and driving licenses, and snoop through bank accounts if they suspect benefit fraud. I wonder how critics of the nanny state — who believe any government intervention sits on a spectrum of tyranny, but who also seem to care little about what happens to those on the margins — will be able to reconcile these conflicting ideas.

Suggested reading

Britain is addicted to poverty porn

By Darren McGarvey

Barely a month ago, the entire nation stopped for a whole week to debate the complex ethical dilemmas of assisted dying, the risk of abuse, and of people slipping through the net due to institutional dysfunction and perverse incentives. But these DWP reforms are bound to pass without so much as a whimper from the media, and even less interest from the public.

The official line is that these powers are about clamping down on organized crime gangs who exploit the benefits system. The reality? It’ll be the usual suspects who suffer — disabled people, single mothers, and those working precarious, underpaid jobs. Much like Kendall’s proposals to scrap the Work Capability Assessment and tighten the screws on mental health claimants, this is just another distraction from Labour’s inability to solve the real problems underpinning welfare dependency.

Labour is pitching all of this as necessary, pragmatic governance, but in reality, the same party that once talked about dignity in welfare is now trying to outflank the Tories from the Right. Hell, even Nigel Farage has softened his tone on welfare, aware his growing electoral coalition now includes, you guessed it, the sick, the disabled, and people on in-work benefits. But Labour, unlike Farage, lacks the conviction to make anything it says sound convincing.

None of this is to say that there aren’t problems with how incentives to work are structured, or that the system isn’t open to abuse. Every system is — just ask the many companies and high-net-worth individuals who shuffle money offshore to avoid paying tax. The difference is that we don’t see the same level of state aggression directed towards them. There are no dawn raids on corporate offices or intrusive, humiliating checks on the affluent who have creative accountants.

Yet, like a low-rent FBI, the department that can’t even answer its phones will have the power to raid homes, crawl over your bank statements and tell you if you’re sick or not. Presumably there are no waiting lists for this service. Well we can’t say we weren’t told. After all, a different Labour leader warned us years ago that we shouldn’t get sick.

In the UK, we don’t do well by our elderly relatives. We make their final journeys about ourselves: the financial toll of their care, the grief we’ll feel when they’re gone. We infantilise them and dismiss them. Yet, they’ve lived through more than we can imagine, often adopting a resigned kindness to ease our discomfort at their lingering burdensome presence. Privately, many carers admit to feeling bittersweet relief when a loved one dies, unaware that the elderly know better than anyone the sacrifices made on their behalf.

As a nation, though, we struggle with the concept of mortality. Whether due to a misplaced cultural stoicism or sheer discomfort at the thought we all die one day, we shy away from discussing death. While we celebrate long lives well lived and mourn the departed with ease, the difficult liminal space between life and death often goes unexamined. And the elderly serve as an unspoken shorthand for the fate that awaits us all.

And so, rather than facing the fact of death head on, we render it an abstraction. Those miserable, lonely deaths happen to those people over there who are just unfortunate; that could never happen to us. We can’t get old people out of our sight fast enough and into our crumbling care system. The unsustainable, fragmented and means-tested care “system” offers little in the way of dignity. Local authorities provide support only to those with minimal assets, and private care is prohibitively expensive. While some nations integrate elderly care into community life, Britain isolates its ageing population in underfunded institutions, often reducing their final years to a slog of survival.

Our European neighbours put us to shame: Germany, France, and many Nordic countries provide extensive support with innovative systems that do more than delay death. The aim is instead to enhance life by reducing isolation, preserving dignity, and recognising every older person still has something of value to offer their community.

Suggested reading

Britain is haunted by Dickensian ghosts

By Darran Anderson

Earlier this year, I glimpsed what a more humane system could look like when I visited the House of Generations in Aarhus, Denmark, for my BBC Two series, The State We’re In. This residential project fosters connection between people of all ages, offering 304 rental units for families, young people, and seniors, alongside shared facilities including a library, workshops, and gardens. I joined a community sing-along where children played with seniors, highlighting the joy and dignity possible in later life. These people were old, yes, but they were vibrant and curious and keen to contribute. Thanks to their high quality of life, they were also more independent and less prone to mental health problems, and therefore able to support their neighbours, whether visiting other elderly folk or looking after young kids for a couple of hours.

This joyous scene starkly contrasted with the isolation I witnessed in Britain. Many elderly people I met here seemed resigned to a slow and painful decline, counting the days until their passing. The UK tolerates such indignities because we collectively deny that we too, will one day face them. If we admitted that such a bleak end likely awaits us too, we wouldn’t stand for the pathetic health offer currently made to the elderly in the UK. Truth be told, I came away from my many encounters with these beautiful old souls certain that a faster life would be no bad thing.

One man I visited sat alone in a cold kitchen, staring at a TV he couldn’t move to turn on, in a puddle of his own urine. Another woman, a full-time carer for her disabled husband, came alive when talking about her love of music and theatre, which she could no longer pursue due to her life-limiting devotion to her partner. One woman, grappling with terminal cancer and early dementia, seemed energised when asked about the meaning of her life — a rare reprieve from being treated solely as a patient. She confessed her fear she was going to hell for her sins, but also that she awaited death with anticipation — quite a purgatory.

No one expects that one day they’ll end up spending Christmas day alone. What starts with a random fall, followed by a routine hospital admission, ends in institutionalisation by the dysfunctional health service and alienation from society. A once-capable human being is reduced to a growing list of ailments, waiting lists, and financial costs. And before you know it, there’s no one to pull a cracker with. This comes as an immense shock precisely because the truth of what awaits us in our third act is never broached in our cold statistical discourse. The process of collective denial that passes for “debate” about social care in the UK rarely touches upon the reality that we will one day become these “bed-blocking” old people. Instead, death is firmly put out of mind for as long as life allows it. Then one day, we are suddenly forced to realise just how old we really are, not necessarily because of the date on our birth certificate, but because society, configured for the economically active, begins shuffling our fragile frames out of view — making greater space for the productive among us.

Oddly, this approach is actually more expensive. Loneliness and neglect accelerate mental and physical decline, complicating care needs. The elderly wither away not from age itself but from the absence of community. The recent debate over assisted dying illustrated just how little we offer those nearing the end of life. Instead of providing compassionate care, we debate helping people end their lives as if this is the pinnacle of ethical progress when, in truth, that entire debate arises in the context of a dire social care system that should shame us all. We must shift the conversation about ageing and death from mere survival to dignity, community, and respect. Unless we do, many Brits will continue to face their last Christmas alone and isolated — a bleak fate that you, too, may one day endure.

This scene takes place just after midday on a Monday — nothing unusual. Commuters and taxis pass by, indifferent to the events surrounding them. This is life in Europe’s drug death capital. Yet, for the city’s marginalised substance users, a new hope has been promised in the form of Scotland’s first sanctioned drug consumption room (SDCR). Scheduled to open last week, safety checks on the building have led to delays. The stunted opening seems in keeping with Scotland’s troubled approach to its drug crisis — the worst in Europe and second only to America, globally. 

The road to the UK’s first official SDCR has been long and winding. The first facility of its kind was run illegally by activist Peter Krykant out of a van in the city centre. In perhaps the most significant example of direct action in the history of drug campaigning in the UK, Krykant’s activism was instrumental in mainstreaming debate around Scottish drug reform, influencing the eventual approval of the UK’s first sanctioned drug consumption room in Glasgow. 

More from this author

Keir Starmer's insulting hypocrisy

By Darren McGarvey

Running parallel to Kyrkant’s campaign was Glasgow’s Heroin Assisted Treatment (HAT) programme, launched in 2019, which aimed to provide chronic heroin users with a pharmaceutical-grade substitute (diamorphine) under medical supervision. This harm reduction approach sought to reduce overdose deaths, minimise the harms associated with street heroin, and improve the quality of life for participants who had not responded to other treatments. 

Despite the initial hope, various reports on its effectiveness present a mixed picture. Participants saw improved health, reduced criminal activity, and access to additional services. However, enrolment was low with only 20 participants while also being expensive at an estimated annual cost of £12,000–£15,000 per person. This led to criticism of its scalability and limited impact on Scotland’s broader drug crisis, especially given the underfunding of other drug treatment services, namely residential rehab. While certainly a significant development in the long arc of a crisis now spanning decades, the HAT programme’s overall impact was nothing to write home about. This is, of course, a running theme where government-backed harm reduction strategies are concerned. 

Legal heaven and earth have been moved to establish a safe drug consumption room in Glasgow. This was initially hindered by UK legislation that criminalises drug possession and use. However, after years of advocacy and pressure from public health experts and local officials, the Scottish government worked with then Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain, Scotland’s chief legal officer, to find a pathway. In 2023, Bain agreed not to prosecute users of the proposed facility, effectively decriminalising drug use within the site and allowing the pilot programme to proceed without changes to UK-wide drug laws. This move marked a significant step forward in harm reduction efforts amid Scotland’s ongoing drug crisis. But in truth, like many policies adopted in Scotland, it came about 10 years too late and is not part of any wider strategy to steady the ship.  

While the SDCR is expected to reduce overdoses, infections, and connect users to services, the deeper issues driving demand for drugs persist. People in deprived communities are 18 times more likely to die from drug-related causes, pointing to poverty as a root cause. The healthcare offer made to the poorest is always inferior, but this inequality is compounded for addicts who face additional stigma in healthcare settings, where addiction is too often seen as a moral failing rather than a health condition. Treatment options remain limited, and SDCRs, such as methadone programmes, will at best merely keep users stable until better solutions emerge. Be under no illusions that this action alone will make any significant impact on the overall crisis.

That’s why it’s odd that the Scottish government chose to expend so much political capital creating the legal headroom for this initiative, because even if it succeeds as hoped, its impact will be minimal. In truth, politically speaking, a legal standoff with London was the path of least resistance when you consider the true scale of the crisis and the action on social inequality required to turn it around. Creating a constitutional spectacle produces a sense that something radical is being done when in truth, the status-quo has simply been repackaged. 

Rather than take more politically risky action that may involve ruffling the feathers of middle-class voters, leaders with no coherent vision for a more comprehensive treatment landscape look instead to well-placed harm-reduction advocates who propose more of the same initiatives. The challenge facing the SDRC is immense. Even if it all goes well, its remit is limited and questions remain as to how exactly these short-term, pop-up initiatives will have any real impact on a nationwide epidemic.  

Consider the practicalities of actually getting people through the door of the facility when it opens. One challenge is geographical: expecting vulnerable addicts to travel into the city centre frequently is unrealistic. Advocates argue there are plenty of drug users within the city centre already who are eligible, but many dispute not only those figures but also the merits of a service set up to target a narrow cohort of serious addicts within a small urban area. Arguably, it’s the intravenous drug users in the city’s surrounding housing estates who are not only most vulnerable but who are also creating the greatest negative impacts in their communities. Wouldn’t they stand to benefit most, with their participation reaping greater social benefits? In any event, how will they be incentivised to make the trip? How likely is it that they will hold onto a bag of heroin and jump a bus into town before safely injecting?  

Even once enrolled, participants face numerous barriers. Many will fear being drawn onto the social work or criminal justice radars merely by identifying themselves or filling out paperwork. Distrust of authority is pathological among this marginalised community for obvious reasons. If they do present at the SCDR, who will greet them? Who will reassure them and gain their trust? Will drug workers with lived experience lead this important work, or will well-meaning but less streetwise staff who arouse suspicion in users pull the strings behind the scenes? Ultimately, will the same class dynamics that subtly underscore lopsided drug policy and debate in Scotland be needlessly replicated, or has serious work been undertaken to identify and correct for that problem? Then there’s the very basic harm-reduction paradox produced by the pilot’s central focus on intravenous drug use — will smoking heroin or cocaine be discouraged even though it’s often safer than injecting? 

Suggested reading

How Britain abandoned Scotland

By Tom McTague

The notion the SDCR will act as a portal to other services only sounds plausible if you know nothing of what’s actually out there in this baron treatment hellscape. What other services do we mean, exactly? Even people with no history of drug problems may wait months for the most basic mental health counselling. The complexities of lives ravaged by addiction, police involvement and homelessness often require specialist multi-faceted care, that is, quite simply, unavailable for most people. Addicts also face lengthy waits — up to a year — for rehab placements should they desire one, by which time the addiction may have deepened, or the desire to enter a residential setting may have waned. We don’t have an integrated system that pulls in the same direction as in Norway, where, for example, rehab facilities are integrated with some prisons. In Scotland, different organisational factions operate independently of one another, pushing their own agendas, pursuing their own interests, often based on selective assessments of a narrow evidence-base and a keen awareness of what’s “trending” with the hapless Government holding the purse-strings.

Staff turnover in the drug sector is also high due to burnout, demoralisation and short-term funding settlements while wider health services are overwhelmed. Unlike Germany or Switzerland — cited often by advocates as best practice that could be easily replicated — Scotland’s fragmented and underfunded services, operating well overcapacity in a more structurally unjust society, will hamper similar success, irrespective of noble intentions. 

I want it to succeed. If not simply for the minor morale boost it may generate at a time where even seasoned campaigners like me have grown apathetic or walked away from the fight to regroup. Despite critics being labelled regularly as cynical (admittedly with some justification), it’s decades of dire harm reduction outcomes in Scotland that fuel this scepticism. The problem is not harm reduction as a philosophy, it’s the fragmented and untimely manner in which Scotland implements these policies. We’re always playing catch up while dealing with the consequences of unforced errors like cutting safe benzodiazepine prescribing (which drove demand for deadly street Valium) or slashing funding to services that demonstrably save lives. This has been the way of things since the first methadone programme was introduced as a treatment in the Nineties and it remains the predominant treatment for heroin addiction despite showing up on around half of all drug death certificates since records began. 

Nearly 40 years later, with drug deaths now many times higher than in those early days, harm reduction remains the only real tool in Scotland’s drug policy box — a political choice and not one imposed by Westminster. The safe consumption room pilot must be viewed in this broader context. Rather than a clean break offering something new, it’s the latest iteration of the same idea we’ve seen before, yet for some reason, we are encouraged to expect different results. Rumours of staff walking out after inductions, a defensive management team unwilling to address tough questions, and the fact the SDCR was still advertising job vacancies as recently as mid-September (one month before it was due to open), suggest to this hardened cynic deeper issues behind the delay than the building safety checks cited. 

If the countless headline-grabbing initiatives we’ve seen throughout the past decade — as deaths have risen to intolerable levels — are anything to go by, this may mark yet another harm reduction gimmick struggling before it even begins. I hope I’m wrong, but it all reads like a familiar tale and one that tells the real story of Scotland’s drug crisis.

Rearranging his team may provide Sir Keir with a comforting sense that a corner is being turned, but the fact that he has been forced into a reset just 100 days into his premiership tells us much about his own poor judgement. Nothing encapsulates this core political defect more than Starmer’s mishandling of the donors issue. The smug and dismissive attitude with which he and his Cabinet attempted to downplay and dismiss the accusations as they began making headlines ahead of the Labour Party conference a fortnight ago was truly a sight to behold. The brazen attempt to recast their freeloading as somehow virtuous, and the growing anger as misplaced tittle-tattle, offered clear signs that power had already begun its corruptive process. And the story of politics being awash with private wealth won’t go away no matter how much Morgan McSweeney wants it to, because this is the story of politics in Britain — and it has been for decades.

The idea that moguls and big business expect nothing in return for their “kindness” is an insult to the intelligence of any reasonable person. Aristotle warned us about this long ago. The ancient practice of corrupting political hearts with flattering gifts is nothing new, and it is effective precisely because it feels harmless to those being lavished with special attention for the first time. But if donors aren’t in it for a political favour somewhere down the line, then why are nurses, GPs, teachers, police and firefighters — arguably far worthier of such generosity — not permanently inundated with gifts? Surely terminally ill children or destitute single mothers fleeing domestic abuse could do with a night out at a Taylor Swift gig. What is it about people in power which so effortlessly elicits the boundless generosity of the wealthy — if not some form of self-interest?

More from this author

Britain is addicted to poverty porn

By Darran McGarvey

The tedious line they have attempted to spin over the course of the scandal — that this conduct falls “within the rules” — is another major insult. There was a time when claiming back the cost of a duck-moat was well within the rules for an MP. Sir Fred Goodwin acted within the rules of the financial sector when he crashed the UK economy from the comfort of his personal scallop kitchen at RBS headquarters in 2008. Indeed, one of the most infuriating aspects of the past 14 years of Tory government has been that almost every moral and ethical crime collectively committed — whether dishing out billions to their pals in contracts, crashing the economy with tax cuts, or immiserating tens of thousands of sick, vulnerable and disabled people through callous welfare reforms — fell well within the rules.

Most politicians don’t just wake up one day and decide to use public office to enrich themselves; entitlement develops incrementally and begins with the seductive idea that you’re a little bit special. One day it’s Taylor Swift concert tickets, the next you’re telling porkies to the Queen. Accepting gifts is not immoral in and of itself, but this is how the culture of corruption (which Sir Keir Starmer claims he sought power to rip out of public life) slowly seduces those of low character. The issue for most people is not whether the behaviour of politicians falls within the rules but that the political class is governed by one set of rules while everyone else is governed by another.

Funnily enough, most other public servants are forbidden from accepting gifts or donations because it is well understood that doing so leaves the system open to abuse. Yet somehow, politicians are ostensibly free to party like it’s 2099 provided they fill out a little form declaring what infuriating hypocrites they are.

Furthermore, government ministers are already some of the highest paid and most powerful people in the country. They already get their food, travel, heating, housing, petrol, pens and paperclips paid for or heavily subsidised. The argument that complimentary hospitality and freebies are a genuine necessity that allow them to do their jobs better is yet more evidence of how endemic corporate influence in politics has become and how adjusted to it politicians in the UK are. The great irony of this scandal is that Starmer’s Cabinet has shown more collective enthusiasm, conviction and clarity of purpose trying to justify their brazen sense of entitlement to corporate welfare than they have on any other issue. Perhaps instead of smugly laughing off legitimate anger at their behaviour, they might better use their energy confronting the moral dissonance which now characterises their young political project.

This dissonance has characterised every one of Starmer’s first 100 days in office. On the Middle East, he seemed more sincere mocking the delegate who spoke up for Palestinian children during his conference speech than he did when calling for an immediate ceasefire. On the riots, he rightly condemned far-Right thuggery and racism before flying out to Italy to copy the immigration homework of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. And given the sheer level of corporate welfare the Labour Cabinet have been helping themselves to, Starmer’s renewed commitment to tackling benefits fraudsters takes on new Iannuccian proportions. It all further demonstrates the ideological contradictions at the core of his “remade” Labour Party. These contradictions are perhaps best typified by his seeming ability to leverage his political privilege for personal gain, while looking the country in the eye and pontificating about the merits of public service.

As centrist dads the country over cling to the delusion that beneath Sir Keir’s floundering political appearance, there lurks a high-minded, icy tactician, the shambles tell a more damning truth about his skills. Evidently, there are some things money can’t buy.

The apparently objectionable book promises to detail Linday’s experience of being accused of transphobia by fellow poets a few years back. After she called out a magazine for publishing a transactivist defending their call to harass and intimidate women at Pride, many of Lindsay’s former friends in the poetry scene turned against her.

For those well initiated in the dynamics of this conflict, and the specifics of Lindsay case, this is already pretty cut and dry. If you’re an intersectional trans-ally, fuck Lindsay. If you’re a gender critical feminist, she is basically Nelson Mandela.

That’s not the whole story though. There is another dimension here: the story of the petty and vindictive competing factions in small tight-knit creative scenes, and how their rivalries find expression as intense culture-war conflicts. There’s plenty to disagree with Jenny Lindsay about, but anyone working in the arts in Scotland already understands how running ideological battles both major and minor can dictate which of us are granted opportunities and which of us aren’t.

This latest stooshie erupted just days after Creative Scotland announced it was cutting the Open Fund — a pot of money ring-fenced for individual practitioners. The announcement has created an atmosphere of anxiety among artists, now less likely to take the morally correct position on Tarbuck’s gentle lobbying of bookshops, which was, at best, deeply unprofessional. This endemic insecurity, engendered by 14-years of austerity, also played a role in many looking the other way when Lindsay tumbled from atop the Scottish poetry community four years ago and speaks to the unwritten cultural commandments which must be adhered to if you wish to survive as a creator in the current climate. Thankfully, as an artist and writer who has never depended on Creative Scotland for much, I am not afflicted by this anxiety.

More from this author

Scotland's poor are left to die

By Darren McGarvey

Since my twenties, I’ve been publicly criticising Creative Scotland for one reason: being tone-deaf to working-class creators. It’s a criticism common among artists from deprived backgrounds, rooted in our experience that the arts as well as the bureaucracies that oversee them favour artists, works and processes generally that reflect their own middle-class sensibilities. There’s a safeness, for example, in much of the work that gets supported, as well as a tendency among many in-vogue artists across the various disciplines to expressively dance around the real causes and conditions of the issues being tackled.

Granted, not everything has to be challenging or radical, and countless creatives from middle-class backgrounds are world-class practitioners who also deserve to be supported. But let’s face it: public funding is a game. A game that selects for those with the confidence, time and sense of entitlement to play it, and who possess an intuitive grasp of what will fly with the funders. A game that makes all those repeated references to the tenets of equality, diversity, inclusion and sustainability found on every Creative Scotland funding application somewhat ironic.

Today, pointed criticism of a public organisation like Creative Scotland, or certain factions situated around it, is now likely to be interpreted ungenerously by some as evidence of other unbecoming beliefs — that’s life in the culture war. It’s this palpable sense that by expressing an opinion on one issue — the unwarranted harassment of Jenny Lindsay — then you may be drawn unwittingly into the cultural tornado of fire that is the gender war and subsequently suffer damage to your fragile career.

Lindsay’s treatment has been made all the more odious by the highly personal, often intimate nature of the hounding. In comedy, rival acts take the piss out of each other on stage or down the pub. In hip hop, we have rap battles. In the poetry scene (once the faux-leather-clad notebooks are placed gently in the biodegradable vegan tote-bags), pathological resentments nursed over years are acted out remotely from behind veils of social justice concern. And Lindsay’s assailants have justified this to themselves as necessary because she is, in their ideological hivemind, an extremely dangerous woman whose beliefs represent a direct threat to the lives of vulnerable trans people.

More from this author

The toxic trope of 'benefit scroungers'

By Darren McGarvey

Like Lindsay and her gender-critical feminism, trans people, advocating for their rights, also have the right to choose how best to do this. That said, when activists (like anyone else) veer so clearly into violent incitements against women they believe transphobic — which does happen — then no matter the justification, it must be called-out in the strongest possible terms. I didn’t understand why that was such a controversial thing for Lindsay to do back in 2020 and to be honest, I still don’t, but that’s what set this whole sorry poetry in motion.

Poetry is supported in a number of ways, whether through grants made available to individual artists, or to other organisations that employ, showcase, mentor or make some other use of poets. Those who remain close to the bosom of the arts body and its satellites are not exactly living it large, but they quickly develop an intuition for the sensibility it demands. One risk few artists will ever take is being seen to either criticise Creative Scotland or pass comment on any arts related controversy which could be construed as a lack of adherence to that sensibility.

As a result, many seem happy to tune-out this fiasco around Alice Tarbuck because it involves Jenny, who is bad, and has been brought to wider note through Right-wing publications such as the Mail and Spectator, which are also bad. This highly motivated reasoning means valid criticisms are often dismissed by artists based not on their lack of merit, but on who makes them and where they are published. In the case of Tarbuck, the hoo-ha is all just a bit of Tory unionist hokum and everything in the arts is fine, case closed. Well, it’s not fine and it’s time more of us said as much.

Jenny’s views are controversial and upsetting for some, yes, but they do not warrant a wholesale attack on her ability to make a living. While freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences, the main judges, juries and executioners in the kangaroo court appear to be her former contemporaries; artists whose work is underwritten in one way or another by Creative Scotland and has been for the best part of a decade.

They won’t picket outside your home or workplace; they don’t write to you seeking resolution, clarification or comment; they use their minor but prominent positions as cultural nodes within the Creative Scotland funded networks that comprise our arts and literary scenes, to drop their hints, comments and the occasional proverbial hand grenade on your ability to make an honest living.

Drawing a wage from a public body should place some constraints upon your conduct in public life, part-time or not. If people want to be activists, then go be activists. Stay away from influential roles in the civic sphere if you lack the self-control to behave professionally. Personal politics may, of course, inform your approach in the workplace, but there’s a line most public servants understand and try to observe. Granted, the behaviour of one staff member should not be overblown, but Tarbuck’s conduct speaks to a deeper cultural problem taking hold in parts of the arts which Creative Scotland must now confront if it has any hopes of surviving.

Suggested reading

Rape trials are broken. Are juries to blame?

By Dani Garavelli

We need a new code of conduct for everyone working over there. Staff should be expected to keep their personal politics out of the process or risk being escorted off the premises. Funding judges should be obliged to declare any associations or prior history with applicants that may impair their objectivity. Similarly, a parallel code of conduct must outline new expectations of artists receiving funding. All recipients must be guided by an explicit directive that they will refrain from interfering with the work of other artists and their ability to earn a living while in receipt of public support, themselves. Such interference, wherever found, should result in the instant withdrawal of support, an order to repay all grants, and a lifetime ban from ever applying in future. One suspects such action may produce its own cooling effect in some overheated ideological conclaves where extremist behaviour appears relative to the level of state subsidy received.

Artists remain free, of course, to express their dislike of one another’s politics, but a signal must be sent to those who apply for financial support that public money is not a supplement to tide them over while they work to deny another artist’s right to earn a living. If hounding people out of the arts is your creative bag, do it on your own dime thank you very much.

From cancer to coming-out, poverty to prison, and addiction to ADHD, this year’s Fringe had something to offer anyone of a voyeuristic bent. This massive rise in comedy, music and drama exploring personal adversities peaked this year with the wildly successful TV show Baby Reindeer — which was itself born in Edinburgh. Today, it seems, we can’t get enough of that “lived-experience” pie.

But many years before this particular pie became a mainstay of the arts, I was one of several unwitting pioneers who road-tested this highly personal brand of storytelling in the most glamorous and prestigious domain of all: Scotland’s third sector.

In 2001, grieving the sudden death of my alcoholic, drug-addicted mother and reeling from a family breakdown which had left me homeless and also on the path of alcoholism, I carried a lot of sorrow and anger which required an outlet. I hastily began up-cycling my trauma into my best attempt at art. A growing interest in hip-hop and rap quickly became an obsession; notepads scrawled with lyrics and ideas, baggy trousers, hoodies and headphones, and the obligatory confrontational attitude.

Performing locally, under the name Loki, at open-mic nights and rap battles, I discharged my adolescent fury as autobiographical stories set to dusty boom-bap drumbeats. My reputation grew in the Glasgow music scene, and I eventually established myself as a community artist. Then when the third sector got a hold of me (and my “story”), I would take to the stage at conferences where professionals sat slack jawed and misty-eyed at my ability to not only tell my story, but to see it in a wider social and economic context: poverty.

Back then there seemed an endless thirst for my accounts of adversity. Whether campaigning for Scottish Independence, calling out decision-makers for letting down the most vulnerable or, indeed, my musical output, everything seemed to land a little better if my opinions or observations were nested within my own “experience”. This eventually culminated in the publication of my 2017 debut book Poverty Safari — part memoir, part social commentary — in which I revealed, among other things, the traumatic experiences of my childhood.

That book changed my life. Overcoming my challenging personal odds, I had been redeemed. People loved my story, my lived experience; they loved me.

In the past decade, as this type of personal disclosure has become a mainstay of civic discourse — reaching beyond the arts and into every corner of culture — charities, philanthropists and, inevitably, politicians, appear to see the value in hearing from those with direct experience of many of the challenges they and their organisations have a stake in addressing.

But those of us sharing our experiences need to be careful. Our stories are also a commodity. They move and inspire professionals. They grace the pages of policy documents and funding applications. They may even become best-selling memoirs, or, in the case of Richard Gadd, world-beating Netflix shows. As a result, we creators may feel we are making a difference but as our “story” attracts more attention, our lives themselves can become something of a performance.

Those of us who trade in the currency of lived experiences are, like everyone else, unreliable narrators. We are always rewriting them, ensuring that we remain the hero. Kernels of truth are discarded and replaced with assumption, speculation or unconscious white lies.

The truth of our lives could never be distilled into a tight three-act structure, let’s be honest. Like most people, we take small liberties with certain details, and massive leaps with others. As a form of entertainment, there’s no real harm in that, but where lived experience is deployed in civic discourse or politics, subtly shaping policy, it is highly problematic.

Much like a fickle Fringe audience, resident critics don’t believe our stories of overcoming the odds are as powerful or useful as our fans. In fact, many are irritated by the vulgar spectacle of watching people vomit their trauma up on social media or on stage. They regard lived experience as a Trojan horse that smuggles unscientific, politically motivated, narcissistic anecdotes and personal opinions into serious matters of science and politics. They balk at the notion those of us with lived experience of trauma or adversity are automatically granted victim status in public discourse, because our stories are not interrogated like other forms of evidence.

Ultimately, sceptics worry that every anecdote is blindly accepted as a statement of fact, and that fear of being seen to “invalidate” the lived experiences of “victims” and “survivors” too often takes precedence over the need to ground discussion and debate firmly within the realm of truth. And they may have a point.

Certain stories of trauma and recovery are regarded as more useful than others, depending on one’s political agenda. Take, for example, the drug-debate in Scotland, where advocates of competing forms of treatment (such as opiate replacement therapy or the 12-steps) tend only to promote and platform those who have succeeded, and rarely mention all the ones who relapsed or died trying to get well with that method. There’s a cynicism at play, not just among the storytellers who develop a keen sense of which plot-points to emphasise and which ones to edit out, but also the organisations and institutions platforming those stories, often as a means of furthering their own social or political objectives.

And then we have the basic issue of safeguarding. What if, paradoxically, the psychological wounds we carry predispose us to enter this performative arena naively, oversharing the intimate details of our lives with little thought given to the fullness of the consequences of doing so. What if our trauma primes us for a subtle form of self-exploitation, where in pursuit of safety, security and validation, we tell our stories in ways that actually make us more vulnerable?

More from this author

Britain is addicted to poverty porn

By Darren McGarvey

Our desire to help others, and, yes, to gain affection and security and love, is often so overwhelming that we push aside any lingering doubt as to our fitness to engage in the risky public exhibitionism which may come to define us. And let’s not forget, once we’ve decanted our traumas into a rowdy and unforgiving public square, we cannot un-disclose them.

But perhaps the biggest mistaken assumption on the part of those who feast rapaciously on our personal testimony, is that we who are willing to disclose so much are representative of a mythical, voiceless mass — that everyone affected by trauma or adversity shares our experience, our pain, our story.

When the truth might be that those of us who do act on this impulse to disclose, and perhaps even overshare, may in truth be a distinct entity, much like people who apply to go on reality TV shows. We are people pleasers. We desire validation from strangers. We feel confident in speaking our minds and wrapping our trauma in a palatable narrative ribbon for public consumption. The greatest irony of the lived experience movement is that most people living with active trauma wouldn’t be caught dead in the media. Most people with trauma don’t even know they have it. And even fewer were at the Edinburgh Fringe — a trauma in an of itself.

So, to the many thousands of acts who sang for their suppers in Scotland’s glorious capital this year, offering audiences a glimpse behind the curtain of their personal lives, take it from me: now that you’ve told your story publicly, it’s not yours anymore. And now that you’ve done telling it, there will be a sudden dip in enthusiasm for anything else you have to say. Once you’ve made your own life the product, you’ll be tempted to drill that reservoir forever more.

I think the public would be far more interested in the real story. The story where we confused the fleeting catharsis of feeling seen, with the painful work of actually healing. The one where we’ve become trapped in our own self-portraits, no longer able to discern the truth of our lives, from the story we’ve created. The one where we naively believed “our” truth, was the same as the actual truth. The Fringe is a great experience for sure, but take it from me, a lived experience pioneer: the next booking you need is not at The Stand — it’s with a qualified therapist!

Such headline-catching measures are attractive to an embattled administration because they are relatively easy to legislate for, cost very little, and create a fleeting sense of forward momentum which temporarily cloaks a distinct absence of big ideas. Over the years, the topics of discussion have tended to change according to fashion, but one has remained constant in every election year: the crackdown on benefit scroungers.

The UK spends 12.9% of GDP on social benefits, according to the latest data, which puts us in fifth place in the G7. Between 2023 and 2024, the Government is forecast to spend £276.8 billion on the social security system, with 55% of that figure going to pensioners. And yet, while the number of people on out-of-work benefits has risen, particularly after the pandemic, the scale of public irritation doesn’t seem to correlate with the actual significance of the problem: the net loss to the DWP for benefit fraud or error was £7.3 billion in 2023. By contrast, the Government’s own figures show that money laundering costs the UK £100 billion a year, while wider financial fraud has been estimated to sit at around £219 billion a year.

Strangely, though, few politicians are banging on about the hundreds of billions lost every year to tax avoidance, evasion and highly organised financial crime. Instead, both Jeremy Hunt and Rachel Reeves are desperate to reassure us all that they are getting tough on the work-shy and the idle. They are going after low-level scammers and old people who can’t fill out forms properly. This highly successful political tactic never seems to get old, regardless of how untethered from reality it is. This is as true of the “shirkers and skivers” rhetoric as it is of the welfare reforms we’ve seen over the past three decades, whereby ill-placed public resentments about social security have been deliberately stoked.

In 1996, with a general election looming, then-Tory prime minister John Major pioneered the benefit-scrounger dog whistle when he announced new “stiffer penalties” for the work-shy and vowed that “those who don’t want to work are exposed”. Labour pushed back against the language, but, as they did with almost everything Major’s Conservative Party stood for at the time, went on to adopt similar reforms after their landslide victory in 1997. Not only that, but they ratcheted up the scrounger rhetoric to levels Margaret Thatcher could only dream of.

Suggested reading

Britain is addicted to poverty porn

By Darren McGarvey

Benefit cuts to single mothers and refugees, “name and shame” orders designed to deter anti-social behaviour, and bizarre plans to kick council tenants out of their homes for being unemployed are not often associated with New Labour. Nor are claims that certain ethnic groups “lacked discipline”, clampdowns targeting “foreigners who come to this country illegitimately and steal our benefits”, or fantastical claims that translating basic public service information for those arriving in the country from abroad meant they would “not have the incentive to learn English”. These things are not associated with Blair in the popular memory — but that doesn’t change the fact they happened during his tenure.

In order to advance the rather thorny issue of welfare reform, the general public had to be conditioned to believe that the enemy in their midst was not exploitative employers, careerist politicians, or an economic model that guaranteed all prosperity was absorbed by those at the top. No, the great fear was the lazy stoner through the wall, and the single mother across the street, getting pregnant for an easy life on the dole.

This narrative may suit the politician, but the root of today’s problem lies in the UK’s sluggish growth pattern, which resulted in a low-wage labour market and threadbare public services. In these conditions of precarity, following a pandemic and during a cost-of-living crisis, more people become ill and, in the absence of a functioning health service, stay ill for longer. And the longer they are out of work, the harder it is to get back in the game. Meanwhile, for those who are able to find a job, the sort of work people now tend to move into is part-time, poorly paid and with no career progression — requiring in-work benefits to supplement. That’s why brags from the Government about record levels of employment ring hollow; full employment means nothing when you have to stop by a food bank on the way home from work.

A responsible and honest political class might set out to correct such misplaced assumptions, perhaps by pointing out that there are billions saved in unclaimed benefits every year. Yet instead, they become the basis upon which subsequent rafts of ill-judged, short-sighted and meanspirited reforms are progressed. This is all the more galling when you consider that this war is waged by largely middle-class, university-educated careerists. Indeed, the class disparity at the heart of British democracy, where working-class voices are largely absent, means there are fewer people to present a counterpoint to the nasty consensus. Today, just 8% of Labour MPs hail from working-class backgrounds.

One might naturally assume this trend is a by-product of 10 years of Tory government — but in truth, it began with a party that exists, supposedly, to protect the working class. “Before Tony Blair came to power there was only a modest difference in working-class and careerists positions on welfare reform”, wrote Tom O’Grady in Comparative Political Studies in 2018. “But our research finds that during his premiership, the influence of working-class MPs dropped while there was a rise in the influence of careerist politicians.” O’Grady found that MPs from working-class backgrounds had “a stronger ideological attachment to welfare provision because it benefits working-class voters”, whereas among their middle-class counterparts, “greater concerns for electoral success and career advancement meant they were more likely to support welfare reforms”. The findings suggest that the large shift from working-class MPs to career politicians in the British Labour Party led to an erosion of representation of working-class voters’ interests. “Put bluntly,” he said, “careerist MPs are much more likely to blow with the political winds.”

Chancellor-in-waiting Rachel Reeves — the latest proponent of blood-curdling rhetoric on shirkers and skivers — was born the year Thatcher came to power. She’s one of a generation of rising stars with no political memory of a time when working-class people had more than a tokenistic role to play in the democratic process. And she parrots the tired Blairite rhetoric about scroungers, while cosplaying as the Iron Lady 2.0 for middle-England voters. It’s worth noting that Reeves has, since 10 December 2019, declared donations, earnings, gifts and other benefits worth more than £650,000. Indeed, the value of Reeves’s registered interests puts her in the top 2% of all MPs. Since the start of the current parliament, only 11 MPs have taken in more than money her. Fancy that.

So, after all these years of reform, where are the results? Well, here’s the thing: they have had almost no positive impact. Indeed, all the evidence shows that poverty has only worsened, and that excess deaths have increased.

The rise in food poverty, in particular, is significant. Figures from the Trussell Trust show that between March 2017 and March 2018, 1,332,952 emergency food supplies were distributed to people across the UK. Nationally, low income was the main reason for referral and accounted for nearly 30% of food bank use. The role of welfare reform was crucial here, with benefit delays accounting for 24% of referrals while benefit changes were cited by 18% — 42% in total. The correlation between Universal Credit and food bank use becomes more pronounced when you map its roll-out, between 2013 and 2018, directly onto the areas which experienced the sharpest rises in food poverty. This reveals an average increase of 52% in food bank usage in the 12 months following the roll-out in each area, compared to 13% outside of those zones.

Food poverty is just one facet of the social crisis driven by welfare reform. A spate of related suicides has been reported in recent years, including some people even leaving suicide notes referring to the DWP. In 2020, the National Audit Office noted that the DWP had investigated 69 suicides related to benefits claims in the previous six years, while disability campaigners claim the true figure is far higher. Meanwhile, despite the fact that cuts in benefits have hit women disproportionately, the DWP’s brutal compliance regime compounds the suffering of the most vulnerable women in a manner which could charitably be described as sinister. The techniques often deployed — coercion, aggression, overbearing surveillance, gaslighting and financial intimidation — either deliberately or through sheer incompetence often mirror those of present or former abusers.

More from this author

How to escape the debt trap

By Darren McGarvey

And in return? The sad truth is that welfare reform in the UK is driven by ideology and has never had any evidential basis. There’s even less evidence for the effectiveness of welfare reforms at getting people back to work. The Welfare Conditionality project, running from 2013–2018, conducted analysis on both the impact of welfare reforms as well as the practices that underpin them. Concerning the lifestyle-choice homeless, the report found that benefit sanctions caused “considerable distress and push some extremely vulnerable people out of the social security safety net altogether”. For those disabled people living the high life, the report found that the Work Capability Assessment — in which people with disabilities must prove they are unfit for certain types of employment — is “intrusive, insensitively administered and regularly leads to inappropriate outcomes in respect of disabled people’s capabilities to undertake, or prepare for, paid employment”.

Where job seekers are concerned, welfare conditionality “did not prompt behaviour change” and claimants felt there was “a lack of clarity or warning that their behaviour was sanctionable, that work coaches were too quick to resort to the use of a sanction, and that sanctions were disproportionate to the alleged transgression”. For the lone parents, it found that “insufficient account is taken of caring responsibilities when claimant commitments are devised”, and that many were sanctioned as a result of “unreasonable expectations, DWP administrative errors, or failures of comprehension rather than deliberate non-compliance”. Across the board, the persistent threat of sanctions caused “extreme anxiety, even when not enacted”.

Here we can see how the UK’s favoured economic model of neoliberalism demands that those who cannot succeed in an economy rigged against them must be held personally responsible for their failure — or commanded to blame someone less fortunate than them to account for their predicament. In the UK, this cultural mechanism is expressed in electoral rhetoric which evokes images of “shirkers”, “skivers” and “scroungers” who luxuriate in mould-ridden council homes filled with extravagant items such as televisions, phones and refrigerators, all day long, on the good honest taxpayer’s dime.

While it is certainly true that any system open to enough people will be abused to some extent, and that benefit fraud does occur, the fact remains that the “benefit scrounger” narrative so readily spouted by politicians is a rhetorical device designed, in the case of the Tories, to cynically stoke irrational resentment about welfare dependency — or in the case of Labour, to cravenly placate it for an electoral advantage.

Nobody does poverty porn quite like the Brits. In the 2000s, it was The Jeremy Kyle Show, presenting the poor, vulnerable and imbecilic as circus freaks for the sport of a crowing audience of working-class viewers who couldn’t see the joke was on them. By the 2010s, with austerity in full swing, poverty porn evolved into a grittier reality-TV format, tracking the lives of various hapless protagonists in the lowest resolution possible, as they stumbled from pillar to post office. Today, in a cost of living crisis, poverty porn is once again mutating to save its own bacon, finding new life in unfamiliar forms where it lurks with rapacious intent, undetected by the untrained eye.  

Its latest iterations take the form of news stories reporting tales of ingenious thrift in the face of skyward living costs and sanguine documentary films scored by stock, royalty-free piano. There, working-class presenters with little sociological grasp of the wider issues talk in sentimental platitudes about how sad, shocked, or angry they feel, bearing witness to the struggles of a permanent underclass — leaning into the well-worn televisual tropes which comprise poverty porn’s scope and aesthetic. Even well-meaning campaigners like Martin Lewis — whose endless tips on how we might save 7p a year by following 10,000 simple steps — fall within the genre which I will now attempt to formally define: any form of media that relies on poverty as a hook, while simultaneously failing to situate that poverty within a wider systemic context.   

The latest submission to the UK penury porn canon is world-beating travel vlogger and YouTube sensation Bald and Bankrupt’s latest upload, “Offered Business on England’s Worst Street”: a 37-minute sociological gangbang in which Bankrupt — real name Benjamin Rich — titillates viewers by shooting BrewDog IPA-ridden loads all over the face of post-industrial Britain, in the form of clichéd drive-by analysis of how shit everything looks. “The shops they have here tell you everything about the state of the economy,” he says, on the standard rundown high street which has become shorthand for the UK’s managed decline. Yet he makes no attempt to elaborate on what that story might be. “We used to build things like this,” he exclaims, gesturing towards a building. “You can’t see a doctor, you can’t see a dentist,” one woman explains, with testimony which threatens to make the film slightly more engaging. Rich’s uncurious response: “That’s interesting, that’s interesting,” before cutting to the graffitied frontage of another derelict pub. 

Suggested reading

The betrayal of Benefits Street

By Tanya Gold

In this Vesuvian cum-shot of commentary, Rich leaves no stone unturned, no vandalised shutter unremarked upon, and no drug-addicted sex worker alone, in a one-man Durkheimian crusade to render the tell-tale signs of urban decay as one-dimensionally as is technically possible using the latest iPhone. There are so many opportunities throughout his journey from Plymouth to Birmingham and then Horden — the UK’s poorest town — to capture something other than the unbearable aesthetic noise of economic dereliction. But, sadly, Rich passes up the opportunity to dive deeper, and, in doing so, effortlessly embodies the vacuous reporting style that so often passes for journalism in the UK. 

 To get our jollies from porn, we must disengage the part of the brain which discerns truth from falsehood, and sometimes even right from wrong. Porn offers little but distraction and fleeting gratification and, like most media coverage of the topic of poverty, would be impossible to sit through if the ugly uncomfortable truths behind its production were placed front and centre.  

Many naturally attribute poverty porn’s tackiness to the poor tastes of its predominantly lower-class audience — a justification cited endlessly by the upper-middle class creators of various soap operas and comedies which depict working-class and poor people amateurishly. However, public fascination with poverty is not just a reflection of what audiences want but also a measure of what is convenient and profitable for production companies and newsrooms to make. Working at the behest of profit-hungry proprietors, under the duress of a strict deadline schedule, or in the case of social media, algorithms which reward frequent uploads that retain audience attention and drive engagement, poverty porn is not a simple matter of taste (or lack thereof), but the result of economic imperatives which incentivise morally dubious content and practices.  

Research into media portrayals of poverty and the poor, published by think tank the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in 2008, showed a tendency towards the sensational prevailed. Indeed, stories were often selected for their convenience to journalists working under time pressure. In daytime TV, the poor were frequently presented as dysfunctional, aggressive, and feckless. Peppered throughout the findings were prominent anonymised quotes from media professionals that revealed how stories about poverty are largely determined, not by social values, but by news values. One journalist said: “You have to make it eye-catching for the news editor to say, ‘Ah, I see why I’m doing this.’ The specialist correspondent has to make a very good case and so you are always looking for the most dramatic top line you can find.” The editor of a regional newspaper said: “Journalists don’t slam the door in the face of the poor. They just don’t go knocking. It’s not just the journalistic process: poor people don’t make their voices heard so their stories don’t get reported.”

More from this author

How to escape the debt trap

By Darren 'Loki McGarvey

The truth is poverty porn is big business. In the year before its cancellation — following the suicide of participant Steven Diamond, who took his own life after failing a lie-detector test — The Jeremy Kyle Show is estimated to have raked in around £80 million for ITV. The discussion around the show’s ethics, with respect to its premise, has always been something of a diversion from the exploitative economics that underwrote it, and all shows like it. All moral and creative justifications for Kyle’s bear-baiting, convincing as they may seem, were self-serving, post-hoc rationalisations: the freaks on that show were the ones behind the camera, who went along with ITV’s twisted Stanford Experiment all the way to a participant’s suicide. While old media struggles currently for the viewership numbers it once commanded, the tropes it firmly established with respect to poverty porn have not only made the leap to social media equivalents — hipsters filming themselves giving homeless people sandwiches being a recent toe-curling trend — but have also set the parameters for how most people think about poverty and the poor: poverty is a personal failing which can be transcended by a hard work, a positive mindset and less whining.  

What’s fascinating about Bald and Bankrupt’s short film is that he is clearly nowhere near as cynical or ignorant as Jeremy Kyle. His YouTube channel is a rare deep dive into cultures that we in the UK are rarely shown. In one video, he travels across the border from Lebanon into Syria, attending a football match in Damascus, where the sight of crowds of Arabs jumping up and down, shouting, fills the heart with joy and not existential dread. In another film, he goes off-grid in Russia, hoping to locate space-shuttles built in the Soviet era. This is a guy who comes as close as a person in the 21st century can get to being an explorer, thanks to his unpretentious, no-nonsense style, his willingness to take genuine life- and liberty-threatening risks, and for the wonderful rapport he has with locals wherever he goes.  

But his formula fails on home soil for one simple reason: Rich isn’t showing us anything we have not already seen. There is no novelty to distract from the lack of depth. No arresting vista to pull our attention away from the low production values. And no old men speaking Aramaic, accentuating a sense of intrigue and discovery, to pull focus from the ropey audio quality. All we see on screen is how little Rich understands the roots of the post-industrial malaise gripping the UK economy.  

Suggested reading

Rochdale has already lost this election

By Julie Bindel

He rails against skyward rail ticket prices yet fails to outline why placing public transport financially out of reach is so damaging, not only to vital educational and employment opportunities, but also the environment. He fails to identify privatisation as a key factor in the UK’s lacklustre transport infrastructure, where the cost of taking a train seems correlated to how unpleasant journeys are becoming. He laments the death of the seaside town, as we all do, but has nothing to say about how a terminally neglected housing stock, cowboy rental markets and an exodus of first-time buyers from London have fundamentally altered their economic topography, pricing people out of the communities they were raised in. He prompts young Romanian boys to talk about how dangerous the community is at night, but fails to engage with local entrepreneurs of ethnic minority origin who are practically keeping what’s left of local economies alive.  

Rich plays bingo with some locals and even has a dance in the pub, and in these moments his personable qualities really shine through, but he forgoes the open goal of examining why gambling and excessive drinking are the only industries operating in these areas which are not in decline: they numb the chronic stress, they quiet the aesthetic noise, and they provide the only safe, warm, comfortable public spaces where social solidarity is still possible. Rich is an everyman acting on his own curiosity, who seems genuinely shocked at the levels of dereliction and despair he witnesses. His problem is not a lack of empathy, nor a desire to exploit anyone; it’s all the bad habits he’s picked up from studying how old media has traditionally framed poverty.  

“Don’t shoot the messenger,” he says, wisely foreseeing well-targeted criticism for his less than stellar depiction of urban dereliction, but his film contains no message. There is no substance, only spectacle. There is no visual flair, only the lazy visual shorthand poverty tourists love furiously beating their meat to. The moment a sex worker tells him she was punched in the face by an abusive man, you can just sense his inner elation at having captured another stereotypical image of deprivation. It’s when the vulnerable woman then asks if he’d like to acquire her services that internally he surely creams his y-fronts. 

While programme makers have become slightly less terrible at it over the years — the trend has been towards more sympathetic and less judgemental portrayals of the poor and vulnerable — poverty porn nonetheless retains its essentially exploitative quality wherever it is found. Right now, somewhere on the streets of the UK, you can be sure that a troupe of media twats is rolling up on a housing estate somewhere to point three cameras at a wall-mounted ashtray filled with pregnancy tests, as they wait patiently in their warm rented cars for something vaguely dodgy to occur — all so they can capture it for Bafta’s consideration.  

The story that is rarely told is the one about how resilient these communities are in the face of their economic immiseration. Not a half-brick’s throw away from every boarded-up high street, every abandoned building, and every burnt-out playpark with commemorative flowers tied to rusted fences, people face their hardships with courage, grace and humour. The single mother applies to go to university, having escaped an abusive male partner. The homeless person attends a mutual-aid group for men with mental health problems, drawing from a deep reservoir of psychosocial support provided by unpaid volunteers, and begins making amends for his transgressions. The traumatised addict keeps turning up at the chemist every morning despite the prejudice and judgement he faces, until one day, his methadone is dispensed for the last time, and he is finally free from the nightmare of addiction.  

Sadly, these are stories that require time, money, insight, and compassion to tell. An accidental satire of the exploitative genre it so desperately attempts to emulate, Rich’s documentary gets repetitive so quickly because we’ve seen this smut so many times before that the spectacle simply fails to rouse us the way it once did. 

As a writer of two best-selling books, people assume I’m well-off. Hailing from background which could comfortably be described as “deprived”, I came to enjoy the feeling of being regarded as successful and prosperous. But behind the scenes, I’ve struggled to keep my head above water. The truth is, over the last few years, like millions of others on this God forsaken little island, I’ve been caught in a web of financial adversity.

I am well aware that my relative privilege as an author and broadcaster may render my difficulties laughable in some people’s eyes. How could someone off the telly have the gall to complain about financial adversity, during a cost-of-living clusterfuck like the one we are living through in the UK. Of course, the key word here is “relative”. Ten years ago, my main problem was being unable to make a carry-out last until the off-licence opened at 10am. Today, keeping up with the taxman is the central dilemma of my existence.

I was caught out by a particular form of tax. The one self-employed people pay. Many years ago, Gordon Brown, in his wisdom, changed the rules around when and how this tax should be paid. When you work for yourself, your tax is not deducted at source, so you are responsible for setting aside the funds throughout the course of the year, and paying what you owe in January. Brown decided self-employed people should not only pay what they owe, but also an additional half of what they were projected to earn the following year — this is Payment on Account. It means that if your tax bill is £15,000, then you have to pay £22,500 by January’s end and then another £7,500 the following July. And if your tax bill is £30,000, you’re up for 45k, then 15k six months later.

More from this author

Scotland's poor are left to die

By Darren McGarvey

But what if, like me, you weren’t aware of this? What if nobody told you that this is how it works? Well, then, you’re fucked. Here’s how it goes: the tax bill comes in, plus the additional “payment on account”, and you realise you haven’t got enough to cover it. And suddenly, the first genuinely great year of your entire life morphs into a terrifying nightmare.

Now, add a random calamity such as Covid, lockdown and an economy in absolute freefall. You emerge from the first high-earning year of your life, only to discover you have the tax liability of a well-paid person, with no capacity to actually earn the money required to settle your bill. And what’s worse, every pound you do claw in is itself taxable. So basically, the money you are making to try to pay the tax becomes your next tax bill. And the more you try and earn to offset this, the harder it all gets. Yes, it’s a first-world problem, but it’s a problem nonetheless.

According to Money and Mental Health, over 1.5 million people experienced both difficult debt and mental health issues in 2023. Money and Pensions Service found that as many as 24 million people don’t feel confident managing their money. And according to the Financial Capability Survey, only a third of those people in debt receive help. One of the hardest things is not being able to talk about it. I couldn’t talk to my working-class friends or family because I feared they would resent me, given the sums I was dealing with. Plus, it seemed arrogant to complain given many of them are still living in genuine poverty. And I didn’t know anyone with money well enough to get into any real depth with them about something so personal either.

But I did consistently face the problem. This is the first difficult aspect of confronting a debt. You have to behave like a person who is in debt. You have to open the letters — they won’t go away. You have to make the calls — they’ll always track you down if you don’t. There is something about accepting the reality of the debt and not resisting nor hiding from it which makes the situation slightly more tolerable.

More from this author

Scotland's drug shame

By Darren McGarvey

The outstanding amount was, for me, a large sum, made all the greater by the punishing fines and penalties incurred. And dealing with HMRC is torture. It’s shaming, confusing and utterly humiliating. It reminded me of dealing with the DWP when I was living in supported accommodation on benefits in my early twenties.

I did eventually come to realise, though, that my pain was not caused solely by the debt but by resentment. I was suffering from the sense of injustice that after a life of having so little, I was now being punished for doing better. My stubborn refusal to fully accept that the debt was my responsibility, was making everything worse.

There was some stubborn pride rolling around in there, too. I enjoyed that people believed I was doing well. It was a tremendous buzz to be regarded as prosperous, given how much shame I had felt as a kid wearing cheap, unfashionable brands, and for how long I’d languished in my alcoholic years, letting everybody down. The pain I was experiencing was not simply the pain of being in debt, but the pain of being humbled. Not humbled the way people claim to be when they win a BAFTA. I mean truly, excruciatingly humbled. I’d fucked up big time, got ahead of myself, and paid little attention to the detail. All my life I had advocated that those with more should pay more. Well, now was time to put my money where my big socialist mouth was.

But while the situation was far from ideal, it was hardly an existential crisis. My family was well looked after. I could work every day if I chose to. HMRC weren’t coming through my door waving clawhammers. Of all the debts you could get yourself into, a debt with a dysfunctional government department is probably one of the cheapest and least stressful, truth be told.

I realised that, if I wanted to pay it off, I had to reframe my experience. In my early days, as a struggling writer and artist, I was extremely industrious. As a teenager, I’d record my own music, buy the blank cassette tapes, hand-draw all the covers and give them out at school. I pressed up my own CDs, handed them in to local record stores and collected the sales the next month. Indeed, my debut book was itself a by-product of my can-do attitude; being crowdfunded, the buzz I managed to generate before it was even finished led to first week sales in Scotland so strong that it wasn’t long until London publishers began sniffing around to see what all the fuss was about.

“So what happened to that guy?” I began asking myself. The success had blunted my wits. Dulled my appetite. Why was I sitting around waiting for something to happen when the situation clearly demanded two qualities I have in spades: creativity and courage? There are many difficult problems most of us will face at some stage of our lives — spiralling debt is just one of them. Once it dawned on me that I’d choose my large debt burden over a chronic health problem, a divorce, or a sudden bereavement, it freed up a little energy to do more than simply tread financial water — I began setting about the debt the way a lumberjack does the trunk of a very large tree.

More from this author

My social mobility shame

By Darren McGarvey

Nothing changes if nothing changes. I decided to take some risks. I announced a UK tour and invited my followers to approach me directly if they wanted to book my show. The response was overwhelming. Within a few days I had one or two shows a week scheduled from March to August. No venue too small. No location too remote. No community priced-out. If they wanted me, I would go. I then partnered with local booksellers in every town and city and shifted a fair amount of stock while on the road. This put a spring in my step. I learned that by sitting down and coming up with a plan, and staying the course as best I could, the mountain of debt needn’t be insufferable.

For years, every morning I woke up and this was on my mind. Every time I thought I was making progress, they would hammer me again with another couple thousand in charges, inflating the figure, leading to more charges and more interest. I took it all on the chin. It was demoralising, yes. But I stuck to the plan and can honestly say I did the best I could. And, a few weeks ago, with tears in my eyes, I called HMRC up to settle the outstanding amount, finally.

This morning, I’ve just spent a few hours signing and inscribing copies of my second book, writing out the corresponding envelopes, and prepping them for delivery. This is how I used to do it in the old days, before anyone knew or cared about my work. I’m not doing this out of the kindness of my heart but out of necessity. And you know what, I couldn’t be happier.

I’m not skint in the way someone who works in a low-paid job is skint. I’m not skint because I haven’t been working. I’m skint because I’ve used pretty much every penny I could get my hands on to get this monkey off my back. My sole motivation, after years of cowering beneath its awesome weight, was to finally settle this fucking debt. A debt which I accrued through a lack of financial education, and I have a feeling this story is more common than people realise.

I say this for the benefit of anyone climbing a steep financial mountain. While every circumstance is different, there are principles I think apply to most people and most problems. The first, acknowledge there is a problem and that it’s yours to solve. Second, identify and eliminate any unhelpful stories you are telling yourself about the problem. Focus on what you can do about it. And finally, come up with a plan to tackle it and stick to the plan as best you can. Don’t hide from it. Even though it often feels impossible, I promise one day, if you hang in there, you’ll wake up and that problem won’t be looming over your head anymore.

Citizens Advice can help advise if you are struggling with debt

This week, that thing was the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election. A two-horse race between the SNP and Labour, the result of which was supposed to offer important clues as to the direction of political travel both north and south of the border. Or at least, that’s what all the commentators and analysts were saying.

They know that the only way Labour can win a significant majority at the next UK general election is if a sizeable chunk of Scotland flips from yellow to red. And Rutherglen and Hamilton West had done exactly that on three occasions since 2010, which is why the SNP and Labour were on a war-footing there long before disgraced MP Margret Ferrier was recalled and then ousted for breaching Covid rules in 2020. Yesterday, there was a 20.4 percentage point swing back to Labour.

The two politicians fighting it out were the SNP’s Katy Loudon and Labour’s Michael Shanks. They are young and energetic. And even though relatively unseasoned, it is clear that each has already acquired the necessary affectations to bullshit their way through a live political debate. So rather than a battle of ideas, during their television debates we saw a battle of the brands fought with all the authenticity of a used-car salesman gesturing towards a smoking electric car, assuring you that “it’s a great little runner”.

We had Loudon, a South Lanarkshire councillor since 2017, pressing Shanks on his change of heart over Brexit and the two-child cap, which places not only him but Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar out of step with Keir Starmer. And she accused Labour of flip-flopping on its commitments, which might have landed more powerfully if only her party, in government now for longer than the Tories, were not also serial flip-floppers.

More from this author

Scotland's poor are left to die

By Darren 'Loki' McGarvey

And then we had Shanks, delivering political platitudes and then failing to press Loudon on her party’s indecision over arts funding, free school meals for all kids, abolition of the council tax, and its position on nuclear weapons. He then turned on her for supporting tax hikes in a cost-of-living crisis, knowing perfectly well that the hikes would be on high earners, living in the most valuable properties — the sort of progressive taxation you’d expect a Labour up-and-comer to support.

What was utterly lacking was anything specific about the actual constituency. The whole campaign has been an exhibition of nervous insincerity. The candidates know what’s at stake; they know they’ve been pulled in off the bench in the 80th minute in the wider war between the SNP and Labour. The sheer volume of heavy-hitters who have made cameo appearances to bolster both campaigns speaks to the height of the stakes here — and to the painful truth at the heart of this by-election: the most deprived locals are merely useful pawns in a tribal game.

Swathes of South Lanarkshire — the local authority in which a decent chunk of this constituency sits — are unglamorous, grey-washed urban purgatories rendered nondescript by post-industrial malaise. Maybe that’s a little harsh. We have some wonderful partially closed Sixties swimming pools.

Poor health and poverty are also embedded across this part of the country. Three years ago, South Lanarkshire Council published public health statistics that didn’t make comfortable reading: two in three people were deemed overweight. One in three was obese. Just 19% of babies were exclusively breastfed — significantly lower than the Scottish average of 27% — and around 20% of children lived in poverty. Out of a population of over 300,000, 41,000 were income-deprived. And the poorest residents of Rutherglen and Cambuslang — two areas which fall within this well-publicised contest – were, at that time, regarded as among the unhealthiest in Scotland.

Some will argue that’s because of their poor choices. But what choices do they have when their community consists of too much traffic on too few rush-hour expressways connecting rundown retail parks to gambling facilities, charity shops and junk food outlets?

The above statistics were published before Covid. Since then, every metric by which inequality is measured is flashing red. We have bouncers on the doors of Tesco Express. Security tags on baby food. And more food banks than we have McDonald’s, all while a billionaire class enters a new space race and no politician has yet suggested taxing them upon re-entry. On the plus side, energy prices are now so high the Tories can only afford to gaslight us for another four months.

Given the level of media interest in Rutherglen and Hamilton West, the scale of political campaigning, and the partisan chatter on social media, the casual onlooker would be forgiven for thinking the contest is of great material significance to local people. They’d be wrong.

This wasn’t about Rutherglen and Hamilton West. This by-election was both a progress report on First Minister Humza Yousaf’s wobbly early spell in Scotland’s top job, and a litmus test for how a resurgent Labour may fare at the next UK election. Pundits obsessed over possible turnout: would SNP voters stay home, unenthused by the lack of movement on indyref2? Or worse still, would more moderate pro-indy supporters sense a chance to oust the Tories and, perhaps worse than staying home, vote Labour. What would become of the Tory and Lib-Dem vote, which, if combined, is significant enough to swing the result if deployed tactically? And what do Jackie Ballie, Angus Robertson, Keir Starmer and Fiona Hyslop think of it all? Utterly riveting stuff.

More from this author

Scotland's drug shame

By Darren 'Loki' McGarvey

This was politics at its worst. There were no big ideas here. No grand visions. Even the insults rang hollow. The reason for this is simple: all that separates these two broadly progressive parties are their respective positions on constitutional issues which grow less salient by day — yet they must engage in the charade that there are profound differences.

According to the SNP, Labour are just the same as the Tories. Labour, meanwhile, wants us to believe the SNP are not the same as the Tories — they’re worse. This level of debate is worryingly disingenuous. Either these people actually believe the pish they talk — or they’re so cynical they willingly talk pish they do not believe. You would find more consistency of logic on the stands of a local football stadium. Yes, it’s politics. Yes, there are forces at play which constrain political discourse in ways that politicians cannot always control. But does it all have to be so tedious and predictable and insincere?

You can really see the draw of becoming a political diehard. Of nailing your colours to the mast and warring till the bitter end. It’s a far simpler existence. You train your eyes and ears for the errors of others, while remaining blind to your own. Behind the impressive professional facades both parties project, what we see are flawed, embittered, manipulative and often quite delusional people. There’s no craft, no skill, and no courage. Just both sides constantly trying to pin things on their opponent that they themselves have been guilty of in the past, or worse, are actively participating in as they speak.

Take the tit-for-tat over public services. The very day Scottish Labour talked up rumours of closures to local police stations, including three in Rutherglen and Hamilton West, blaming SNP cuts, the Labour-controlled council in neighbouring North Lanarkshire was forced into an embarrassing U-turn following a backlash to its planned closure of no less than 39 cultural and leisure facilities. Labour insisted the by-election was a mini-referendum on two failed governments at Holyrood and Westminster — but Labour is the party in control of both this constituency’s councils. Whether centrally controlling their parties, marginalising critical voices, or announcing policies they have no intention of actually implementing for fleeting traction in the press, the idea that one of these political shitshows has a moral high ground above the other is utterly laughable.

It suits both the SNP and Labour to portray themselves as diametrically opposed, but they’re two flaps of the same fanny. Most of us see clearly that these apparently rival factions are variants of the same essential strain of managerial centrism — both holding the belief that you can radically change society without doing or saying anything radical.

Suggested reading

Scottish nationalism is fuelled by resentment

By Kathleen Stock

Anas Sarwar, while steering Scottish Labour assuredly through some choppy political waters, claims Scotland needs fundamental change and says he can provide it. But I’ve looked up “fundamental” in the dictionary and that doesn’t match his actions. As far as I know, he has been out chapping doors for days in the plusher parts of the contested constituency, warning those comfortable homeowners cloistered around the best-performing schools that the SNP plans to punish them by raising their council tax to something approaching fair. This, from the same Labour Party that simultaneously lambasts the SNP for failing to reform local taxation after 16 years in government.

Their campaign has involved walking the classic centrist tightrope of promising action to the poorest on poverty, while keeping the middle-class happy with the sort of perks that only entrench the inequality. Scottish Labour needs to attract the kind of people who are not worrying about multi-morbidity, or two-week waits for GP appointments, or the stigma of food poverty, or the two-child benefit cap. Being on the right side of Scotland’s educational attainment gap, and a world away from the drug death crisis, voters of this ilk, while certainly feeling the cost-of-living pinch, are not exactly hard-up. And if they vote Labour, they’ll expect something in return. They’ll expect the various mechanisms by which opportunity is distributed blindly upward to be maintained and expanded.

Conversely, the SNP is paying the price for a decade spent playing the same game. Their problems run deeper than Yousaf being less popular than predecessor Nicola Sturgeon. The tragedy is that at precisely the moment where Yousaf could legitimately claim to have moved even further to the Left than ever before — going toe-to-toe with landlords over short-term lets, pioneering child poverty payment, nationalising Scotrail and abolishing peak fares — their own base is beginning to lose interest. People are so numb after years of political capital being blown on the pretence that another referendum was imminent that, even though the SNP seems finally to be using devolved power to make a difference — safe consumption rooms, progressive taxation, and at some point in the near future, a Scottish Welfare System — many simply shrug when these achievements are pointed out.

The biggest problem both parties have, even if they end up in power at the same time, is that they are now political hostages to their own bullshit. Namely, the volatile constitutional issues of Brexit and Independence in which they are now, in their own ways, enmeshed, yet forbidden by electoral imperative from speaking honestly about.

Suggested reading

Rural Scotland is dying of cold

By Cal Flyn

The SNP has known for a long time that IndyRef2 will not happen soon — even the movement’s most gung-ho campaigners are placing the next referendum a firm 10 years away — yet it has engaged in the charade that it was just around the corner. Meanwhile, the party insists that because Scotland voted to Remain, we’ve been torn out of a lucrative political and economic union against our will, failing to see the contradiction at the heart of their campaign to take Scotland out of the UK without evidence that a majority of Scots actually want this to happen. The SNP wants us to believe two contradictory ideas at the same time: that Brexit is harmful to Scotland and that Independence won’t be (I’m all for indy, but I’m also realistic about the challenges it will bring).

These intellectual gymnastics are mocked and mirrored by Labour. Starmer, Sarwar and the rest of them must pretend Brexit is settled and that the shambles of leaving the EU in the hardest possible fashion has had little bearing on the UK’s dire economic fortunes — even though they understand only too well that such a tumultuous exit from the Single Market has made the very people who voted for it poorer. But Scottish Labour must also talk tough on independence to fend off the threat of the Scottish Tories, while knowing full well that the Scottish Government will always be severely constrained in the progress it can make when key issues such as immigration, labour laws and most taxes remain the preserve of London politicians.

More from this author

My social mobility shame

By Darren 'Loki' McGarvey

Some might be relieved that constitutional issues were not as prominent in this by-election, but it is clear that, without the mobilising prospect of a rematch on either Brexit or a second independence referendum, Labour and the SNP will return to their comfort zones, taking their loyal bases for granted, pricing-in working class apathy, and targeting middle-class moderates whose political convictions could be written on the back of a fag packet — leaving space for all 228 lines of “Tam o’ Shanter”.

The only people actually buying what the politicians are selling are devout party activists, students yet to be disabused of their naivety, partisan hacks who study politics the way your Auntie Betty studies Emmerdale, and middle-class moderates who’ll swallow any old, reheated pish for stable house prices and a quiet two-driveway life. Nobody else gives a shit. If we can be bothered, we turn up on polling day, we hold our noses, and we vote for whichever party we believe is the least terrible option that year.

Coincidentally, the scepticism many Scots feel when London journos take a sudden interest in our affairs is precisely the scepticism many in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West constituency probably feel about the preening top-flight Scottish politicians chewing scenery in the run-up to the by-election. Working-class people here are mere beads on an abacus, their votes appropriated for some national narrative that doesn’t serve them. Today, the travelling political circus will pack up and leave without a backward glance.

We elect politicians to advance our interests. But to advance the interests of any group, one must first understand something of those interests. How many MPs have experienced poverty? How many have had their toilet breaks timed or their in-work benefits slashed?

At what point do we look for the root of Britain’s problems not in the lifestyle choices, attitudes, and behaviours of working people, and the poor and the vulnerable, but in the groundless assumptions, false beliefs, and prejudices of the apparently educated, cultured and sophisticated?

If the pandemic brought one thing into focus, it was surely that “social distancing” — that is, the vast ravine of social experience between those who hold power and influence and those on the receiving end of their decisions — brought Britain to its knees long before the pandemic.

The links between social deprivation and health problems are well understood. We’ve known for the best part of 40 years that rapid deindustrialisation was a public health time-bomb — we chose not to act.

In the Eighties, the publication of the infamous Black Report — commissioned in 1977 by the previous Labour government to investigate health inequalities — found significant differences in health outcomes between the social classes in both sexes and all age groups. The report’s introduction stated: “Social class differences and mortality begin at birth. In 1971, neonatal death rates (deaths within the first month of life) were twice as high for the children of low skilled workers as they were for the professional classes.”

The Thatcher government did all it could to suppress this report’s findings. Sir Douglas Black’s recommendations — that social inequalities around death and ill-health had to be confronted seriously by raising child benefit, improving housing, and agreeing minimum working conditions with unions — were dismissed before being kicked into the political long grass.

The trends already set in motion when the Black Report was published accelerated and became simply undeniable during the pandemic, demonstrated by the disproportionate impact of Covid on working people and the poor.

More from this author

Scotland's drug shame

By Darren McGarvey

In the post-industrial community of Possil, north-west Glasgow, the impact of this health gap is both ubiquitous and imperceptible, so adjusted have its residents become to falling ill and seeing loved ones taken before their time, while public officials scratch their heads, puzzled as to why these people can’t just get it together.

As dusk falls at around 5pm, the two local pubs are already busy. Some are keener to talk than others but every person I speak to is managing at least three concurrent and chronic health conditions — known as multimorbidity in the medical profession.

Previously associated with the elderly, multimorbidity is beginning to impact people at a much younger age. In the pub, half of the patrons enjoying an afternoon tipple are afflicted by mobility issues. Two have trouble speaking due to respiratory problems. One has a degenerative brain disorder and struggles to stay in the conversation, while his long-suffering son (and designated driver) brings him another half.

One man, Andy, tells me about his first health scare at the age of 29. Despite his healthy glow, he has suffered four subsequent heart attacks since the first. Once a keen marathon runner, Andy is now restricted in his lifestyle and stands out today because he is the only person in the pub who is not drinking. He is here to spend time with his friend, who sits adjacent, panting, his crutches rested against the table, sporting the haunted expression of a man who knows his next breath may be his last; Andy’s company, I’m positive, is most welcome.

More from this author

My social mobility shame

By Darren McGarvey

Andy shares a worrying (and hilarious) story about his fourth heart attack, which he had in his home around the corner from the pub. Given his relative experience of cardiac arrests and his disinterest in going to casualty — where he was convinced doctors wouldn’t believe him — he decided simply to wait it out in his home until morning, before going to see a GP whom he trusts.

That GP was Dr Lynsay Crawford, who has worked in areas like this for most of her career. “There’s a fatalistic attitude,” she said. She described an interaction with a patient who was weighing up the pros and cons of making a dramatic lifestyle choice to prevent an early death. “I remember chatting and they said, ‘My life’s rubbish, I know if I did all these things, I’d live longer but I really don’t want to live a longer rubbish life,’” she laughed. “You’ve got a fair point my friend, my work here is done,” she joked. “Another therapeutic success!”

This levity, which arose from the close proximity Lynsay had to her patients, contained a healing quality of its own. She took the time to get to know them, their conditions and idiosyncrasies so well that cracking a joke, or shooting from the hip when someone requires some tough love, was a matter of instinct. I was deeply moved by her devotion to this resilient but challenged community — and how loved she was by those under her care.

Sadly, Lynsay no longer works at the local practice. Due to the work-related stress and the effect on her home life, she moved on. After years of trying to communicate the impact of poor healthcare provision on both patients and the local practice, she became resigned to the fact nothing would change — much like her patients in the face of their ailments.

Suggested reading

Why pit villages turned to rave

By Tom Newlands

What chance do communities like Possil have when resources are so scant that even doctors who love the areas in which they work, and understand them intimately, feel they have no choice but to practise medicine elsewhere or risk their own health and wellbeing?

“We can’t get doctors to come and work in deprived areas,” she explained, “so if you’re living here, you might have to wait weeks to see a GP — who’s got ten minutes to see you.” Lynsay identifies funding as the central issue. Specifically, the disproportionate levels of funding granted to affluent communities, where health problems are fewer.

It’s in these conditions that some people simply stop contacting the doctor’s surgery and instead self-medicate at one of the numerous local pharmacies, where codeine-infused, highly addictive painkillers, sleeping medications and potent cough mixtures are advertised prominently in the windows and are readily available without prescription. It is also in these conditions that toothaches become abscesses requiring emergency surgery; aches and pains become chronic mobility issues; strange lumps, put quickly out of mind, become stage four cancers and mental health problems and addictions become drug deaths and suicides.

“The disconnect is definitely with those who make policy,” Lynsay tells me. She believes the NHS alone cannot resolve health inequalities because they are caused by wider social issues, like education, unemployment, and housing, but that the lack of funding to the NHS over the last decade has exacerbated many of the long-term issues, leaving different factions within the NHS fighting over the same dwindling pot of money.

Suggested reading

Britain's forgotten King of the North

By Dan Jackson

Lynsay questions the wisdom of splitting resources equally among all practices regardless of need and believes this funding formula is why the gulf between social classes with respect to health is widening. “The overwhelming body of evidence shows those in poorer communities have worse health (at a younger age too) and have a greater need for funding to reduce health inequalities. It is clear that equal distribution of funding is leading to greater inequality.”

Despite people from poorer backgrounds requiring more healthcare than those in more affluent communities, they receive less. Wealthier patients’ health problems tend to be less complex — multimorbidity and poverty are synonymous — requiring less time to explain during a consultation, yet they may receive, on average, a minute or so longer with their physicians than someone from a poorer area. Analysis from the Health Foundation in 2020 found that patients in the richest areas receive 11.2 minutes on average while those in the most deprived communities get 10.7 minutes. This is not an anomaly. This imbalance is written into health systems and is known in the field as the “inverse care law”.

This is a community defined culturally by its poverty-induced health and social problems. For every heart attack, stroke, drug death, murder, and suicide there are countless family and friends on the periphery who must absorb the loss of a loved one while trudging on with their own challenging lives. Here, everyone is mourning a loss of some kind.

The lifestyle so often associated with people who live in post-industrial communities like this — overeating, excessive drink and drug use, gambling — provides temporary comfort and fleeting familiarity and continuity in what can be a chaotic, deeply disheartening, and tough existence. Many adopt fatalistic attitudes towards their own health because it’s a way of exerting control over external and internal circumstances they understandably feel are beyond them.

Suggested reading

How cities killed desire

By Mary Harrington

In areas like Possil, across the UK, people in most need of care are simultaneously the most distant from the health services that could improve or save their lives. Life expectancy for men is 66 and for women is 73 — though both sexes have the lowest life expectancy of all neighbourhoods in this city. The number of people hobbling around on walking sticks, frames, wheelchairs, or mobility scooters is astounding.

Meanwhile, politicians in charge of the purse strings, keen to remain in the good graces of the middle classes, are far too attuned to their own short-term electoral interests, at the expense of longer-term health equality. And every time they act in those interests, thus postponing confrontation with the reality that wealthier citizens hoard too many resources, poorer people fall ill and die.

But perhaps the most shocking aspect in the ongoing public health debate, so often centred on notions of individual responsibility rather than systems which demonstrably favour wealthier citizens, is how distant most people remain from the ugly, irrefutable truth: poor health is absolutely a choice — a political one.

Extracted from The Social Distance Between Us: How Remote Politics Wrecked Britain by Darren McGarvey, published by Ebury Press on 16th June at £20.00 Copyright © Darren McGarvey 2022

However, as is often the case, he succumbed to the curious allure of the substance he was peddling: heroin.

“Are you not aware of the damage the drug causes?” I ask, perhaps glibly, keen to hear how he now justifies selling the drug to vulnerable people, like young mothers and the homeless. He pauses briefly, locating what, to him at least, feels like an appropriate, face-saving response: “I never took heroin until I was 27. I went through a heavy withdrawal.”

The withdrawal associated with heroin and, indeed, all opiates, is brutal and unforgiving. Indeed, the phrase “kicking-the-habit” refers to the physical agony of going cold-turkey, where addicts become emotionally and physically excruciated as the substance makes its long, painful retreat from their tortured minds and bodies, forcing them to kick-out involuntarily, as if convulsing.

Serious heroin addicts with a high tolerance for the drug become trapped in the hellish cycle of scoring drugs to escape withdrawal symptoms, which isn’t cheap. This is why criminality becomes a necessity for many.

This bone-chilling fear of withdrawal trumps the shame of social exclusion, the indignity of prison and the permanence of death. The need to pursue the next fix, at the cost of all else, leaves many drug-abusers physically and morally disfigured.

Suggested reading

My social mobility shame

By Darren 'Loki' McGarvey

Only when contending with that reality, does my 50-year-old drug-dealing friend’s rationalisation for peddling smack sound a little more believable. Having gone through a ‘rattle’ — slang for withdrawal — he, in his own words, “knew how much these people needed it”.

It’s broad-daylight in the heart of this bustling post-industrial community. Another two men loiter behind a pair of battered phone-boxes which partly shield them from the glare of a busy high street. They’re here to score. It’s not even tea-time and nobody anywhere is battling an eye-lid. The police-station round the corner will close shortly, not that it will make a difference. Here, even the cops have all but accepted that drugs and their attendant miseries are inevitable.

Scotland has a proud pioneering history. We brought the world antibiotics, telecommunications and a paradigm-shifting enlightenment. But we also lead the way in delusional hubris, and finger-pointing. In Scotland our successes are our own, but our failures — and they are many — are usually someone else’s fault. And by far the greatest blemish on our storied history in recent times is the collective abandonment of the most vulnerable, persecuted and excluded group in our society: drug-addicts.

Data recently published has revealed that in Scotland, drug-related deaths rose by a shameful 27% last year to 1,187. That means the death-toll in Scotland was equivalent to five Lockerbie bombings or fifty 7/7s. It is nearly three times that of the UK as a whole, and, per capita, the drug death rate in Scotland is higher than that of the U.S. Yet no national emergency has been declared.

Suggested reading

The even more deadly hurricane surging across America

By Ian Birrell

In 1996, an e-coli outbreak, which affected 200 people and caused 21 deaths, led to a public inquiry which produced a damning report placing blame on a Wishaw butcher and council health officials. But in 2019, with tens-of-thousands hooked on drugs and 1,187 dead last year, there is quite simply no accountability. The buck stops nowhere.

In Scotland, the drug-problem is now out of control. Much like a fire that leaps from one structure to another, it has taken on a life of its own. It is now self-sustaining, independent of the conditions that caused it.

And the cause has baffled many. Myself included. It may be attributable to a number of factors, including the sharp managed-decline of the industries around which many working-class communities formerly cohered. The mechanisms by which they once lifted themselves out of poverty were sacrificed on the altar of the free-market and replaced with Frankie and Benny’s, American-style shopping malls, casinos and, in Dundee (the drug-death capital) a world-leading design museum — partly funded by the billionaires implicated in the U.S. opioid crisis.

Drug-related deaths, like untreated disease and violence, beget drug-related deaths. Much like flowers that drop seeds before wilting, those who perish in such sordid, undignified and often terrifying ways, don’t serve as warnings to others; instead, they become martyrs of sorts. They are mourned, not just by their families, but by those they with whom they sought and used the drugs that killed them.

Opiates such as heroin, diazepam, methadone and morphine are implicated, but by far the most consequential development in recent years has been the rise of counterfeit versions of prescription benzodiazepines, such as etizolam (street Valium) as well as cheap, deadly imitations of the popular American anti-anxiety drug, Xanax.

Suggested reading

Why I regret my war on drugs

By Charles Falconer

My theory is that the drug problem is worse in Scotland for the same reason the drink, cigarette and life-expectancy problems are worse: the severity of deindustrialisation was that much more acute north of the border because we lacked the political autonomy to mitigate its impact in context-specific ways. Then again, I’m not an academic. Maybe it’s just the weather that’s killing everyone.

A compounding factor is the panic that grips those communities of drug-users who can’t go a day-or-two without hearing another story about someone who’s died. Thanks to a largely useless mainstream media (with a few notable exceptions), drug-abusers are invariably portrayed as vulgar, selfish and feckless individuals, whose problems are entirely self-generated. The notion that they may actually care about each other and, indeed, take care of one another, has thus far, eluded the public conscience. But drug-takers survive by moving in tight-knit communities, bonded by the acute and constant social-exclusion they endure.

Every time one addict is found dead, the others grieve. They sense too that they might be next. They feel that society has all but abandoned them. Socially excluded, bastardised by the public and misunderstood by many who wish to help them, what is there to live for? And so they do what we all do when terrible things happen: they reach for whatever numbs the pain. And so the fire spreads, tearing through entire families and communities, leaving death and despair in its wake.

Back on the street corner, as the men candidly regale me with their tales of drug addiction, the self-abuser in me begins to feel nostalgic about my past drug-use — a sign of the insanity that defines the condition of addiction. I drift into a day-dream about that half Temazepam from years ago, that I should have just swallowed before the police got their hands on me. “What a waste”, I think to myself, able to recall its sweet taste and chalky texture in my mouth.

Also known as benzos, eggs, norries, rugby balls, vallies, moggies, mazzies, roofies or downers, tranquilisers came in different forms. One was a small egg-shaped pill, soft to touch, not dissimilar to the texture of a Kiwi fruit. The other, a thick, white, chalky tablet.

Suggested reading

The absurdity of legalising drugs

By Peter Franklin

They start to take effect between about 20 and 40 minutes after swallowing, at which point a euphoric lethargy washes through mind and body. You are not tired, but should you close your eyes, you would appear to be asleep. Falling asleep after the drug has taken hold, though, would be a terrible waste of its pleasant effects.

Staying awake is also important because it can be terribly hard to wake up out of a tranquilised sleep. And physically getting up is quite the chore. Limbs are heavy against whichever surface you are rested upon. A hard floor becomes a soft bed.

The constant physical tensions you often mistake as natural mannerisms (a furrowing brow, a tapping toe, or an incessant nail-picking finger) begin to leave the body, joining an exodus of unintentional scowls, facial twitches and stomach butterflies. You feel heavy, but the extra weight is offset by your lack of desire to move.

Should you wish to speak, you may notice your voice is noticeably quieter — not because it is being suppressed, but because it returns to its natural level; it is no longer inhibited by the physical stress placed on the voice-box, which so often modulates the tone and volume of your speech. Words come a little easier, especially for those who struggle to make conversation because they second guess themselves.

You listen more actively and are usually more considered and sensitive in your response. It’s hard to know if it improves how you communicate, or whether you are just less concerned about communicating badly. You may also suddenly feel capable of articulating precisely that which you so often struggle to express. Words that have failed, eluded and embarrassed you, become your keen and humble affiliates – or perhaps this is a lack of concern for how much nonsense you are really talking.

These are called tranquilisers for a good reason. They induce a peace, serenity and sense of well-being that is difficult for even the most prolific and articulate drug-abusers to describe.

To the uninitiated, such a drug may hold an alluring curiosity. “How do the dealers come up with this stuff?” you may ask. But this drug is not the vulgar concoction of illicit dealers, it is a pharmaceutical-grade, state-approved chemical-compound. And one which was so widely prescribed by GPs in the Nineties, that addicts have been chasing its effects ever since.

Suggested reading

Sadiq Khan, the knife-crime fall guy

By James Bloodworth

That’s why, even though drug-abuse is so often framed as an issue for the feckless individual, we must also consider why and how these substances are created — and how thoughtlessly (and sometimes malignantly) they are introduced into society.

What risk-assessments were undertaken before drugs such as methadone, diazepam and tranquillisers were introduced through the NHS? Beyond the risk-benefit analysis on the individuals being legally prescribed them, what other factors were taken into consideration? When drugs are road-tested for approval, their broader social-implications are rarely contemplated.

There is a long-established pattern of drugs being developed and introduced into society through pharmacies and healthcare-systems before later being withdrawn because of their negative social impact. An impact which cannot be predicted when the chemicals are tested on rabbits and rats.

In 1895, for example, the German drug manufacturer Bayer marketed diacetylmorphine (an opiate) as an over-the-counter cough-suppressant under the brand-name Heroin. Yes, you read that correctly. Heroin was developed as a morphine substitute but despite being marketed as “non-addictive” it wasn’t long before it scored some the highest rates of addiction among those who used it.

Fast-forward to the opioid crisis in the United States where over-prescription more than 30 years ago claimed the lives of over 200,000 Americans between 1999 and 2016. The United States is home to 5% of the world’s population but currently accounts for 80% of all opioid use. Again, those communities devastated by 21^st-century deindustrialisation are the ones more adversely affected – with the opioid-crisis rising sharply in the period of economic-decline between 2001 and 2009.

Where the U.S. led, Scotland followed. Research published by Scottish Universities in 2018 found that 18% of the Scottish population was prescribed at least one opioid painkiller in 2012 and that “there were four times more prescriptions for strong opioids dispensed to people in the most deprived areas, than to those in the most affluent areas”. Every bit of data available points to a large increase in the prescription of addictive painkillers like co-codamol and tramadol over the last 10-years in the very communities where people are dying.

Suggested reading

Why I like my politicians to be hypocrites

By Giles Fraser

The drug-crisis may be framed as an issue about dangerous cocktails of counterfeit drugs, but many of the illegal substances on the market today, the ones linked most often to the drug-deaths, are simply amateur attempts to mimic the effects of state-approved substances which were either withdrawn or restricted — once the damage was done. Also, people who become dependent on pain pills may switch to heroin because it is less expensive. In 2016, the National Institute on Drug Abuse in America estimated that nearly half of young people who inject heroin turned to the street drug after abusing prescription painkillers.

The fake drugs are dangerous because nobody can ever be sure what’s in them. State-approved drugs are dangerous because when over-prescribed, they increase the likelihood of addiction and tolerance and therefore the demand for drugs rises — including the fake ones. While America is now doing something about the scourge, what are we doing in Scotland? The Scottish government has cut funding for Alcohol and Drug Partnerships by 6.3% since 2014/15.

Which brings me to my final point. The risk of addiction rises in areas of deprivation for a multitude of reasons. There is interplay between the prescription of drugs for health problems and the subsequent uptake of addictions. This is as true of treatment for physical pain as it is for anxiety and depression. It is also commonplace for people to take drugs that were not actually for them.

Analysis by the BBC suggests around 2.3 million people in England took a prescription painkiller that was not prescribed to them in 2016-17 alone, which means we can be sure it’s going on in Scotland. My drug problems actually started when my gran gave me a painkiller to help me sleep when I was a teenager. Within a week, I was dipping into the medicine cabinet.

Suggested reading

America's other drug epidemic

By Peter Franklin

In poorer communities, ill-health is more commonplace, increasing both the likelihood of treatment and the risk that a patient (or someone in the household taking the drugs) may become dependent. Society is awash with psychoactive substances in an age of chronic emotional and psychological stress. Increasing numbers are turning to drugs designed to treat chronic physical pain and mental health problems to self-medicate the emotional pain, stress and anxiety of poverty and social alienation.

Put simply, without serious action on social-inequality, drug-related death and despair are inevitable. If we want to make a serious impact on this matter, we must be prepared to analyse the environments in which addictive behaviours are likelier to emerge.

For some, the social conditions are so miserable, the addiction so severe, and the range of options available so few, that injecting a dirty needle into the groin, despite already having had a leg amputated, seems like a reasonable solution. When that’s your threshold for pain, popping a few tablets is merely a formality.

Back on the street corner, one man is bloated and jaundiced, his black, sunken eyes disappearing into a weathered yet expressionless face. “You have a choice before you take it”, he says, “but after you’ve tried it the choice is gone.” The others nod knowingly as do I, before they break into a discussion about addiction, each recounting their experiences of drug misuse in a manner suggesting they are all, in their own way, resigned to its permanence.

I tell them I have never tried heroin, and they all warn me to keep it that way. Even though they have only just met me, because I have showed them a modicum of respect, they have a genuine concern for my well-being. For in their world of addiction, crime and social-exclusion, telling someone never to try heroin is an act of purest love.

It’s far trickier, however, to touch the topic when you’ve made a few quid. When you’re no longer scraping to get by, questions are asked as to how authentically you can represent working-class experiences. In fact, aren’t you going to have to turn that righteous fist on yourself?

Having spent my life railing against middle-class people and the wealthy, certain that their affluence was in some way linked to my hardship, I now find myself at an uncomfortable crossroads. In the past year, I’ve been given a taste of how the other half live, as the material circumstances of my life changed dramatically. While I still feel like the same person, I feel that my claim to being working-class grows more tenuous by the day.

Further reading

Does class still count?

By James Bloodworth

The pivotal moment came when my first book, Poverty Safari, won the Orwell Prize last year. The first thing I asked was: “Can anybody take this away from me?” That question revealed a lot – mainly how I felt the opposite of entitled to win or to even be considered.

That year still feels like a dream. I am now often introduced not only as an Orwell Prize-winner, but also as the writer of a book that George Orwell himself would have commended. This strange association with one of history’s most celebrated authors is flattering but, as I feel it, undeserved. And yet it has quite simply altered the course of my life forever.

The accolade parted the choppy sea of circumstance that for so long had obstructed my progress. Those invisible barriers that impeded my social mobility disappeared and the glimpse of a previously alien life, one without constant financial anxiety, came suddenly and surprisingly into view.

Some people seem bred for success. When people of a higher social caste become successful it is unremarkable and rarely something they must justify. When you grow up in poverty and become successful, you are never allowed to forget it. “Where did you learn to speak so well, Darren?”, is the innocent but rather offensive question I am routinely asked by people who haven’t won an Orwell prize. There’s a reason why some find my ability to articulate coherent sentences so surprising. Few would ask privately-schooled Glaswegian historian Niall Ferguson where he learned “all the big words” he uses.

Further reading

Why middle England became middle class

By Peter Franklin

That’s not the worst of it. The real boot in the balls comes when, having been deemed successful by society, you are repeatedly held up not simply as an example of a ‘diamond in the rough’, but as poster-child for the system itself. The system you succeeded in spite of. Having made your name railing aggressively against the status-quo, you are suddenly celebrated as living-proof of its enduring utility.

But one mustn’t complain. One must be grateful to have ascended the slippery snakes-and-ladders board of British society, right? Mustn’t rock the boat too much, for what is given can also be taken away and I (hubris alert) worked hard for my seat at the table. The fear of losing that seat now plays an intrusive role in my thinking, so utterly bowled over by my luck that I dare not protest too much in case the seat is abruptly revoked.

Rather than success, prestige or wealth giving me more freedom to tell society some hard-truths, it has become a rein which, when politely tugged, brings me reluctantly into line. Being granted a seat at the table, rather than unleashing my inner-revolutionary, has had an immediate, moderating effect.

Some of you know what I mean, don’t you? Those of you who can still recall the moment you were offered a seat. You recall the sudden tension between concerns about your community and concerns about yourself; your earnings, your social-standing, your legacy and your next move up the board. When you began to see yourself as your colleagues, contemporaries or an audience might see you, and your incorruptible principles developed a sudden and convenient elasticity which, rather than a lack of moral fibre, became evidence of your fair-minded maturity.

Further reading

Why 'separate but equal' is a fraud

By Polly Mackenzie

The previously strident views you once held and regularly espoused got easier to laugh off as naïve and idealistic. The jobs you called other people hacks for doing gradually gained your respect. Those expense accounts you once criticised as excessive were suddenly justifiable and fair. You changed. You adjusted not only to a certain quality of life, but also became intuitive to what it simply would not do to say, should you wish your run of luck to continue.

It’s amazing how quickly you attune to the prevailing sensibility in this lucrative domain of legitimacy. How grateful you are for the exacting dimensions of the professional sandbox you have been permitted to play in.

I’m now the guy who talks about poverty. My seat at the table is contingent on my willingness to regurgitate ‘personal experiences’ of class, addiction and trauma because that is the reheated vomit that guarantees my social mobility.

I still harbour radical beliefs. I’m still angry. But every seat at the table comes with its own unique restraint. Mine is no different.

Further reading

Too posh to fail

By James Kirkup

I can still recall vividly the struggles I faced prior to moving up in the world, but that visceral sense of poverty’s all-consuming immediacy is impossible to retain. I am already beginning to forget what it felt like to struggle on a daily basis.

The impact of political decisions on me is now negligible. That’s why many in my tax-bracket can afford to lecture others about being ‘civil’ and ‘polite’. Affluence pampers you to the extent that you can no longer relate to those whose lives are routinely thrown into chaos because of ill-considered (or downright malign) political decisions.

Twelve months of living comfortably has partially numbed me to the reality millions face in the UK, so what hope is there for those with real power and influence, who rarely contend with reality at all, to bring about meaningful change? In the absence of enough seats at the table for everyone, I fear they will have to be rudely upturned at some point. After all, nothing captures the attention of the ruling class like poor table-manners.

From the moment I booked my first ever First-Class train ticket – the morning after the Orwell ceremony – I was different. The rules of the game changed the second I had something to lose. The moment I realised there is something worth conserving.

Perhaps some of you other ‘diamonds in the rough’, ascending the ladder, will identify with this description of bitter class-conflict? Not the class-conflict curdling public discourse in Britain, but the one quietly raging within your own heart. This is not to say that I don’t still have an appetite for radical change or am unprepared to make sacrifices in pursuit of social justice. But if revolutionary mischief is imminent, it is now highly unlikely that I’ll be firing the starting-gun.