Evening Telegraph (First Edition)

Jobs can save us from drugs

IT’S national and internatio­nal news – Scotland has the highest drug deaths in Europe. Glasgow and Dundee are the worst of the worst.

Yet the SNP government says their drug policies are working.

Can we believe anything that they say?

The city council has a new council leader who said on the day he succeeded Teflon John (Alexander) that he remembers Dundee as a dour cold place.

I was born in the 1950s and Dundee was a thriving city with heavy industry at its heart. Then we had Timex, NCR, Valentines, Keillor’s and many more jobs for the people of Dundee.

Then under the Labour councils we lost businesses left, right and centre.

So when the local elections took place, I thought, as many other people thought, give the SNP a chance.

After all they couldn’t be as bad as the incompeten­t Labour councils. How wrong I was.

They took incompeten­ce to a whole new level of incompeten­ce. There’s so much unemployme­nt in Dundee it’s heartbreak­ing.

Young people leaving school must wonder how they can ever be expected to survive in a city with no jobs or hope. Is it any wonder drugs are rife.

Instead of spending millions of pounds on ego projects like the V&A and now the Eden Project, why not spend money bringing jobs to Dundee?

Not poorly paid jobs. Hotel work or call centres. We need real jobs. High paying jobs. Until that happens we will lose generation­s of young people to drugs.

The sheer hopelessne­ss for the young people of this once beautiful city is palpable.

God help the young people, because Labour and the SNP certainly have not.