The Scottish Parliament voted firmly last night to reject Liam McArthur’s Assisted Dying bill. It’s the third time legislation such as this has been defeated in the devolved era. Mr McArthur now says he’ll continue the struggle.

On the day a politician tried to impose a culture of death on Scotland, we were reminded once more of the state’s contempt for the living. A year after the country’s first drug consumption facility was opened, we learned that deaths from addiction in Scotland have risen by 8%.

When Scotland was first revealed to be the drug death capital of Europe, the outrage and sense of national shame dominated the national conversation for months. Now, we have become so numb to their effect that we simply shrug, look down and shuffle away. The annual increases in premature deaths of our most vulnerable people is one of the Scottish Government’s most catastrophic failures.

Last year, they were offered the chance to remedy this by passing the Right to Recovery Bill. Instead, the SNP and the Bearsden Bolsheviks in the Scottish Greens chose to reward the addiction quangos and the sprawling executive class that feeds on them.

MSPs reject assisted dying Bill after late night vote

How every MSP voted as Holyrood rejects assisted dying

Many of those who had voted in favour of Mr McArthur’s bill were responsible for killing the Right to Recovery bill. There’s grim symmetry in this. The addiction death numbers laid bare how the professional hand-wringers at Holyrood really view Scotland’s marginalised people. By choosing to allow them to keep themselves topped up with Class A narcotics the Scottish Government tells them that their lives, quite literally, are worthless. This was underscored a few months later when many of them chose to........

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