I know Tarves. A small, just over one thousand population town/village, only half an hour bus journey away from Aberdeen’s railway station.

Why the railway station? County Lines drug, child abuse and people trafficking, gangs send their young dealers and armed enforcers into the heart of smaller ‘county’ towns, by rail.

In these towns they ‘cuckoo’ vulnerable adults, moving into their homes to deal drugs at lower cost than local dealers can, backed up by threats and attacks at a level of violence previously unseen. Children as young as 11 have been known to be bullied into working as dealers. The homes often become dens for prostitution, including at an under-age level.

To my knowledge, only one Scottish town has driven a county lines gang, from Bradford, out. See: https://talkingupscotlandtwo.com/2023/11/29/locals-confirm-ayrshire-riots-were-against-british-drug-gangs-who-abused-under-age-girls/

Mainstream media in Scotland seem averse to drawing any connection between this plague terrorising Scottish towns and its origins in England. Either by design or subconsciously, they recogniser the damaging effect such a narrative would have on the Better Together message. See: https://talkingupscotlandtwo.com/2024/05/07/not-better-together-hundreds-of-county-lines-gang-stories-in-a-month-but-not-one-about-the-55-groups-operating-in-scotland/ and: https://talkingupscotlandtwo.com/2023/06/30/why-are-scotlands-national-media-not-reporting-the-terror-of-english-county-lines-gangs-in-scotland/

Today, STV News online has used the headline: Heroin worth £9,000 seized and man charged in county lines operation and mentions: Searches were carried out at five properties across Aberdeen, Liverpool and Tarves, Aberdeenshire, in a joint operation between Police Scotland and Merseyside Police but refrains from clarifying the direction of the flow of drugs is from Merseyside ie Liverpool, in England.

Across England and Wales and as far north as Cumbria, the BBC makes no bones about this plague and its origins in English cities but BBC Scotland will not go there. Their last and only use of ‘county lines’ in a headline was on 27 May 2021, THREE YEARS AGO, regarding drug pushers in Dingwall (!) but, in the text, makes no reference to any English city nor to England. You really have to ask why are they not reporting on a serious and deadly threat to the lives of drug users, in every corner of Scotland, contrary to their own love of Scotland’s drug deaths reporting and of its dramatization in the series Top Boy.