CORRUPTION of innocence does not get much more grotesque than a child hooked on heroin. The horrifying case of an 11-year-old Glaswegian girl found comatose last week after smoking the drug has caused the public authorities to swing into action.
Teams of social workers have visited her. Glasgow City Council has launched an inquiry. Police are investigating. The Scottish Justice Minister has condemned “anyone (who) would sell substances like this to an 11-year-old”.
But the incident does not challenge credulity. Britain’s previous youngest heroin addict, a 13-year-old, was also from Scotland, and anti-drugs campaigners on the estate where the latest victim lives say that there are others like her. What this sordid incident really challenges is the Chancellor’s assertion that “only the State can guarantee fairness”.
In the grim Glasgow housing estate where the 11-year-old hails from, and estates like it in Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Dundee, the State is ubiquitous. It houses, feeds, clothes and educates. In many households it is the sole breadwinner. The minority of adults who do work are likely to be employed by it;the State employs a higher proportion of Scots than in any other democracy. It recruited 9,000 new employees last year alone, bringing the total number of Scottish state employees to 577,300. And what do vast swaths of them do? They pursue social inclusion, often as drug outreach workers, on these grim housing estates.
If Mr Brown were right, Scotland would be nirvana and its peripheral housing estates idyllic. Here state provision of services to eradicate squalor is lavish. Spending on the NHS, schools, benefits and social care exceeds any elsewhere in Britain. Yet, after three decades of Labour dominance and seven years of the Labour-dominated Scottish Parliament the welfare state is failing utterly.
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What has Labour ever done for Scotland? Apart from low life expectancy and economic stagnation, an honest answer must include 11-year-old heroin addicts, the highest rate of adolescent alcoholism in Europe and a level of teenage pregnancy to match.
Nowhere, then, is David Cameron’s assertion that the State alone cannot win the war on poverty more thoroughly vindicated.
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The author is a former Editor of The Scotsman