11,000 dead in a decade: How incompetent politicians are dooming more Scots to an early grave – Susan Dalgety
Voters are sick of posturing politicians who put narrow party interests before the people they serve, even over issues as important as Scotland’s drug-deaths crisis
Are our politics broken? I ask because in this last week alone I’ve seen enough evidence to suggest that, if not yet broken, Britain’s party political system is in a critical state. Destroyed by single-issue activists and career politicians, with an out-of-touch establishment too selfish or lazy to care.
Take Jack Middleton, 31, the nationalist MSP for Aberdeen Central. His profile on LinkedIn is straight out of central casting: a politics degree followed by a career serving his SNP elders, including Deputy First Minister Jenny Gilruth and former First Minister Humza Yousaf, before making the big time as a special adviser to John Swinney. He won his glittering prize in May when he was duly elected to the Scottish Parliament, where he is now one of 129 MSPs with the power to make our lives better, or worse.
The secret to young Middleton’s success seems to be his loyalty to the SNP. He is a shameless sook. Witness his performance on Wednesday during the debate on drug deaths. The figures for 2025 had just been published and were so shocking that I’m still trying to process the scale of the tragedy.
READ MORE: Why so many men are being killed by Scotland's drug deaths crisis as synthetic substances take hold
SNP should feel shame, guilt and grief
I lived in Wester Hailes throughout Edinburgh’s HIV/Aids epidemic that killed scores of young people addicted to cheap heroin, so I have some understanding of the destruction that poly-drug misuse can wreak on communities, but the scale of what’s happening in Scotland is beyond belief. Deaths related to illicit drugs rose by 11 per cent in 2025, to 1,133, bringing the total number in a decade to more than 11,000.
Eleven thousand Scots killed in ten years. Eleven thousand families grieving. A national scandal by anyone’s measure. Even a party as thick-skinned as the SNP must surely feel shame, guilt, grief even, that 11,000 Scots have died on their watch.
Not if young Middleton is anything to go by. He stood up in the chamber that I and many thousands of Scots campaigned for before he was born and blamed Westminster for the deaths. “…the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 is holding us back from the radical action that we need to help some of the most vulnerable people…” he opined.
Never mind that the Scottish Government, which Middleton no doubt has his eye on for his next career move, has full powers over health, housing, social work and so on – every intervention required to help people recover from the scourge of drug addiction, but only if they are deployed with a laser focus and sufficient resources.
‘Shameful, irresponsible nonsense’
The SNP government seems to prefer a pick-and-mix approach of harm reduction – including free methadone – with limited opportunities for rehabilitation and recovery. It is clearly not working, and the SNP’s carelessness makes me ashamed of the parliament I once hoped would build a better country.
And I am not alone. One of Scotland’s most respected public policy experts, Professor James Mitchell, of Edinburgh University, posted this on social media in response to Middleton’s intervention: “Citizens will continue to die so long as this shameful, irresponsible nonsense is the response.”
But it is not just the SNP which regularly displays disdain for the concerns of the people they serve. I watched the pantomime at the Liberal Democrat conference earlier this week when party activists passed an ‘emergency’ motion that rejected the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s guidance on single-sex spaces which followed last year’s Supreme Court ruling.
READ MORE: SNP 'hellbent on continuing failed approach' to Scotland's drug deaths crisis as fatalities soar
Instead of standing up for women and girls and the rule of law, the Lib Dems chose to side with men who ‘identify’ as female. Not even the calm logic of Zoe Hollowood, chair of the campaign group Liberal Voice for Women, who spoke against the daft motion, could persuade her colleagues to see sense. As far as the Lib Dems are concerned, men can be women merely on a whim, and that’s an end to it.
Politicians who put narrow party interests first before the people they serve. Political parties which heed their activists’ obsessions rather than the electorate’s very real concerns. A Prime Minister elected not by the people, but installed by his party’s members.
A political class that seems unable to confront, let alone deal with, the extreme challenges facing all of us: a fragile economy, an epidemic of mental illness, out-of-control tech, global conflict – the list is as long as it is terrifying.
READ MORE: Party politics has no place in tackling Scotland's shameful and growing drug-deaths crisis
A hung parliament beckons
Whether a thirty-something man with a chaotic drug habit living in one of Scotland’s poorest postcodes, a female survivor of male sexual violence terrified of strange men, or a family struggling to get by on little more than the ‘living’ wage, our fears, even our lives seem of little consequence to the people in charge.
Last Friday night, I spent a few hours in the company of some truly amazing women, celebrating Pam Gosal’s award at the annual UK Asian Achievers event. Gosal was a Tory MSP until May this year. She remains a feisty, effective campaigner for women’s rights.
The women round the table were a mixed bag: a Deputy Lord Lieutenant, a young Tory activist, a Labour peer. A couple of others who I know well but have no idea, nor care, which party, if any, they support. What unites us is our sex, and our determination to stand up for the rights of women and girls we will never meet.
Earlier this week, a large seat-by-seat poll by YouGov suggested that if a general election was held tomorrow, no single party would have enough seats to form a government. Support for Reform may have plummeted, but the three main parties can take no comfort from Nigel Farage’s fall from grace.
People are not fed up of politics. They are scunnered by this generation of posturing, incompetent politicians.
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