Less than two weeks ago, the SNP voted down the Right to Recovery Bill. The Scottish Greens who voted with them announced at their annual conference on Sunday that they wanted to put free heroin on the NHS. So why, asks Herald columnist Kevin McKenna, did they vote against a bill aimed at rehabilitation and recovery?

One of the darkest days in Scotland’s devolved era arrived two weeks ago. That same morning a group of people had gathered outside Holyrood. They comprised in the main addiction survivors who’d campaigned for more than four years in support of the Right to Recovery bill sponsored by FAVOR (Faces and Voices of Recovery).

Later that day, Holyrood’s MSPs would vote finally to reject the only piece of legislation guaranteeing a path to recovery to some of Scotland’s most vulnerable and marginalised people.

The fraudulence and hypocrisy of Scotland’s platinum-lounge left in both the SNP and the Scottish Greens have been a defining feature of Scottish politics for a decade or so. This has chiefly been seen in their joint war on working-class communities as they seek to police their language, criminalise their private thoughts and dismiss them all as bigots for refusing to sign up to their cultural agendas.

In the case of the SNP Government it’s been evident in real time as they’ve consistently failed Scotland’s most disadvantaged communities in every sector where their writ runs: health, education, housing, jobs and child poverty.

Yet nothing seemed........

© Herald Scotland