One of the problems with politics is we have some people who do not resign when they should and other people who do resign when they shouldn’t.
In the first category, obviously, is Derek Mackay (who is still an MSP) and Margaret Ferrier (who is still an MP) but there’s someone else who I think we should include in the second category: Joe FitzPatrick, the Scottish public health minister. Seriously: why on earth has he resigned?
The immediate reason was the report that revealed the scale of Scotland’s drug-related deaths. The National Record Office said 1,264 deaths were registered in 2019, an increase of six per cent on 2018, and more than 3.5 times the rate of the UK as a whole. Mr FitzPatrick said the rising death toll was the most difficult problem he’d ever faced in the job.
“As the minister responsible for this area,” he said, “I ultimately take responsibility.” But Mr FitzPatrick’s resignation was curious for a number of reasons. First, his statement was written in the usual code. He did not resign, he “agreed” to resign, which is a coded way of saying he effectively had no choice.
The stated reason for the resignation was also coded: “it is clear my presence as a minister will become a distraction” – in other words, what he’s really doing is blaming the media and the opposition for daring to cause the “distraction”. And that phrase – “I ultimately take responsibility” – is interesting too. Look how the word “ultimately” creates distance between the words “I” and “responsibility”.
Mr FitzPatrick’s departure was curious – and, dare I say it, unfair – for a number of other reasons too. Do we believe, for example, that in an operation as tightly and centrally controlled as the SNP’s, it was Mr FitzPatrick who was really making the decisions?
If I may mix my military metaphors, it is Nicola Sturgeon who is calling the shots, but Mr FitzPatrick who must fall on his sword. It’s also strange that Mr FitzPatrick has effectively resigned for the wrong reasons. There have been cuts to rehab beds, and that’s a bad decision because we know rehab can be many times more effective than methadone at keeping heroin addicts clean. But that said, there have been cuts right across government and if ministers were forced to resign because of cuts, there’d be practically no one left in the Scottish cabinet.
Which brings us to the last, and most important, problem with Mr FitzPatrick’s resignation, which is the extent to which the Scottish Government is to blame for the drug crisis. Clearly, ministers need to accept the consequences of cutting rehab beds (and I’ve spoken to lots of people who say rehab was the key to their recovery, or the recovery of people they know).
But what’s really to blame here is the culture, promoted at Westminster, in which a “war” is waged on drugs and much less is done on the actual causes of drug use, such as poverty.
I’ll never forget a young man from Cranhill telling me once: “Come to an area like this one if you want to see why people are using drugs." It’s here, I think, that the key to the problem can be found and, to be fair to the Scottish Government, it has made some efforts to move on from the war-on-drugs culture.
For example, it says it would like to pilot consumption rooms but can’t because drug legislation is reserved to Westminster. With subjects like this, obviously, you need to be wary of the SNP because it always wants to start a fight over devolved powers, but in this case it seems clear that the UK Government is resistant to consumption rooms because of its traditional outlook on drugs.
Allowing users to take drugs safely would be “giving in” and refusing to fight the “war”. The Scottish Government has also been experimenting in other areas.
In Caithness, for example, it funded a pilot scheme that aims to get in early and deal with some of the risk factors that can lead young people to take drugs: a lack of parental involvement, or a lack of healthy alternatives such as sport, or even just a lack of self-esteem. The scheme is based on one in Iceland which has dramatically reduced drug use among teenagers and, before he resigned, Joe FitzPartrick said he was looking at extending the scheme to other parts of Scotland.
I’ve seen for myself what this kind of early intervention can do. I spoke to one young man from Easterhouse, Billy, whose father was a heroin addict and he told me he could easily have gone down the same road. But luckily for him, he was spotted by his teachers who suggested him for the mentoring scheme run by the charity MCR Pathways. They put him in touch with a former teacher from Easterhouse and she was the constant presence in his life that he needed. He thrived and ended up going to university.
It was a similar story in Bellshill where I spoke to a young man called Steven Henderson. When Steven was 15, he was hanging about the streets getting into fights, and he acknowledged things could have got much worse. But in his case, it was the YMCA who spotted him and got him involved in football training.
All of the familiar themes come up: identity, stigma, violence, drugs, and in the poorest parts of Scotland, it starts early. Rehab rooms can fix the problem when it becomes critical, but the point is to try to prevent the problem starting in the first place.
Of course, to do that costs money, and the lack of it is why groups such as MCR Pathways and the YMCA have had to step in. But as well as the cash, you need a change in the culture too, and a shift in focus towards the causes of drug addiction as well as the symptoms and consequences.
To be fair to the Scottish Government, it has already shown signs of being willing to make that change. And for that, the SNP deserves not blame, but a healthy amount of credit.
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