By Professor John Robertson OBA, former Faculty Research Ethics Chair, UWS

A day after BBC Scotland and other Scottish media fail to tell us the direction of flow between drug abuse in the West Midlands and Dundee and as a new offence of ‘Cuckooing’ comes into law today, in England and Wales, is this a problem in Scotland?

What is cuckoooing?

Cuckooing involves a criminal taking over the home of a vulnerable person in order to establish a base for illegal activity such as sex work or drug dealing, often as part of a county lines operation. This can also often involve financial, physical, mental and emotional abuse of the vulnerable resident.

https://www.salvationarmy.org.uk/modern-slavery/cuckooing

In October 2023, Police Scotland were intensifying action against the practice:

Police Scotland targeted drugs dealers who exploit vulnerable young people during a national County Lines Intensification Week of activity – between Monday, 9 October and Friday, 15 October 2023. Proactive action by officers across the country saw a number of vulnerable people being identified and safeguarded and addresses used for cuckooing being visited. Illegal drugs and offensive weapons, including a firearm, were also recovered.

Assistant Chief Constable Andy Freeburn said: “The harm caused by illegal drugs across Scotland is well-documented and County Lines drug dealers bring nothing but misery to our communities. They exploit vulnerable people and groom and threaten young people to become involved in their nefarious activities.

“Over the week we have worked in partnership with a wide range of national organisations, including the Serious Organised Crime Taskforce, to crack down on those involved in County Lines activity.

“Our message is clear, this is simply not welcome or tolerated in Scotland.”

During the UK-wide initiative – co-ordinated by the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) – officers in Scotland safeguarded 17 vulnerable people and engaged with another 650. 373 addresses believed to be used for the purposes of cuckooing were also visited. 25 people were arrested for a variety of offences including; being in possession of a firearm and ammunition, attempted murder and the supply of illegal drugs. In addition 18 warrants were executed.

https://www.scotland.police.uk/what-s-happening/news/2023/october/police-scotland-acts-to-protect-young-people-from-county-lines-drug-dealers-during-week-of-activity/

Are Scotland’s media properly informing the people of these risks in their midst?

Scotland’s tabloid media, despite their Unionist agenda, have not hesitated to tell the story – sales trump ideology?

This month alone, the tabloids, with readers predominantly from less well-off communities, the Scottish Daily Express, the Scottish Daily Mail and the Scottish Sun, have headlined the plague of extreme violence, drug abuse, drug deaths, child abuse, the ‘cuckooing’ of the vulnerable, people trafficking and prostitution, surging across small-town and rural Scotland, as County Lines drug gangs from English Cities have spread into every corner.

Despite their open, often rabid, hostility toward the SNP, these newspapers have been unable to resist the morbid and scary appeal of these stories for their readers, risking, to my mind, support for the Union.

In sharp contrast, the serious media such as the Herald and the Scotsman along with BBC Scotland’s TV and radio news output, have studiously ignored this, now 5 plus years drama, despite regular Police Scotland reports, official crime statistics revealing a surge in violent crime in areas such as the Highlands, Moray and Aberdeenshire, and stubbornly high drug deaths statistics.

What explains this curious shielding of the professional classes?

Power – these are people who influence and who make decisions about life in Scotland, in the fields of education, health, crime, transport, the economy, and so on. They vote too.

In April 2024, Allan Dorans MP, SNP Westminster Policing Spokesperson, wrote in the international policing journal, Policing Insight:

Why is this? Understanding newsroom cultures and the fast, often knee-jerk responses to incoming stories is not easily done, and suggestions of conscious political agendas operating in them can be over-stated.

Decisions about what policing to prioritise, what crimes to resource, and which of these most deserve investment in intelligence gathering and pre-emptive action, are being made within a middle-class world informed by media operating carefully to avoid divisive and sensitive issues.

More plausible, to my mind, is the notion that a culture develops within media organisations over many years, to predispose decisions about what to report and what not to report.

Professional journalists, often graduates of the same elite Scottish universities, who have moved for careers mainly within the same national broadcasters and ‘quality’ press, who mix professionally and socially with similar professionals in government, in education, policing and other public services, tend to ‘know’ without the need for debate, what is appropriate.

County lines gang members are predominantly, almost entirely, from ethnic minority groups from only English cities, and they are operating in small towns across the UK, causing extreme suffering.

For Scotland’s news broadcasters and elite press to report them in full would be to expose for mass public consumption, narratives that would unavoidably fuel racist and anti-English sentiments. Journalists at BBC Scotland, STV News, the Herald and the Scotsman sense these dangers and will not go there.

That is all-too understandable but there are consequences for policing in those towns damaged by county lines activity.

Decisions about what policing to prioritise, what crimes to most resource and, critically, which of these most deserve investment in intelligence gathering and in pre-emptive action, are being made within a middle-class world informed by media operating carefully to avoid divisive and sensitive issues and also lacking in local knowledge.

It seems all-too plausible that this explains how a full-blown riot [Auchinleck, East Ayrshire, November 2023] risking the lives of locals and officers could have been allowed to explode, despite warning signs in the local press and in social media for days and weeks beforehand.

Policing county lines gangs in Scotland: Is a lack of mainstream media coverage making it more difficult?

The Auchinleck County Lines expulsion ‘riot’ best illustrates how establishment media will retell a story to create a very different reality – https://talkingupscotlandtwo.com/2024/04/19/the-bradford-gang-that-tried-to-spread-misery-into-auchinleck/

I agree with the above explanation and it conforms to the Propaganda Model theory of Professor Noam Chomsky based on a wide and extensive range of similar phenomena and, at its centre, the notion of interlocking elites, and of the educated and invested professional classes, being easier to dupe than more alienated working-class groups. See – https://chomsky.info/consent01/