Indeed, in three pieces of legislation currently moving glacially through Holyrood’s systems of scrutiny it’s mainly the Scottish Tories who seem alive to their potentially bad outcomes for vulnerable and marginalised people.

Last month, I attended a talk in Glasgow given by Alba MSP, Ash Regan who was seeking to raise awareness of her campaign to criminalise prostitution in Scotland through her proposed Prostitution (offences and Support) Bill.

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I’ve always had a rather simple verdict on prostitution: that any bloke who pays for sex is effectively committing statutory rape. The men who go to these women are using their economic power to take possession of them in transactions that many of them believe also includes the right to use sexual violence.

Even so, hearing the numbers and the brutal reality of why women are driven to prostitution and how it affects their physical and mental health is a message that bears constant repeating.

The Scottish Government’s own 2016 report into the nature and scale of prostitution in Scotland couldn’t have been clearer. “Most respondents who provide services and support to those involved in prostitution,” it said “emphasised a range of risks and adverse impacts associated with prostitution in the short and longer term in relation to general and mental health, safety and wellbeing and sexual heath.”

Six years later, a report on the lived experience of prostitution was heartbreakingly bleak: that the risks of suffering physical violence were very high, up to and including murder; that prostitutes are 18 times more likely to be murdered than women in general and that there were higher levels of physical and sexual violence experienced by people involved in prostitution. In some places, every women engaged in prostitution will have been subject to male violence. The male perpetrators will include all those engaged in the chain of exploitation: pimps, brothel-keepers and those who profit from the international sex-trafficking trade.

You would have thought that Ms Regan’s Bill was one that every politician masquerading as liberal could easily support. But you’d be wrong. The Scottish Greens in particular seem to have no problem with the sexual exploitation of women and many Labour and SNP politicians remain to be convinced. Ms Regan has also been provided with scant parliamentary resources to work on this bill. The odds are against her. 

Emma Caldwell was murdered in 2005 - prostitutes are 18 times more likely to be killed than women in general (Image: free) Aspects of Scotland’s boutique liberal fraudulence are also evident in another piece of legislation that’s taken more than five years to reach the committee hearing stage. The Right to Recovery Bill, sponsored by Faces and Voices of Recovery (FAVOR) is only fully backed by the Scottish Tories. Instead, Scotland’s liberal elites choose to spend millions each year in the false flag of ‘harm reduction’, the phrase that Scotland’s affluent addiction sector uses to salve their consciences when Scotland’s appalling annual drugs death totals are announced.

Annemarie Ward, the CEO of FAVOR has been telling this wretched cohort: “You keep talking; we keep dying”. She recently outlined the overlap that exists in the fate of prostitutes and addicts. “Harm reduction excels at mitigating some immediate risks: overdose, HIV, STIs, but it doesn’t ask why these harms occur in the first place.

“Why are women selling sex in public parks and from the laptops? Why are people injecting heroin under bridges and seeking oblivion at any cost? Why are some communities flooded with methadone and needles, while others get schools and jobs? These are not mysteries. They are the predictable results of trauma, poverty, violence, neglect, and dislocation. Yet the harm reduction model often ignores these root causes in favour of a minimalist public health response. Clean needles and supervised drug use are offered as ‘care’ while the trauma, the exploitation, and the despair go unaddressed.”

The Scottish Government is now trying finally to kill off the bill after years of handing its favoured cohort of agencies millions of pounds. Effectively their message to this swollen suite of per diem of brow-furrowers “we don’t care what you do, just keep the junkies away from our nice neighbourhoods”.

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Clare Haughey, convenor of the Health Committee overseeing the Right to Recovery Bill, has told Ms Ward and Stephen Wishart - co-authors of the Bill -  that only one of them can appear before her to give evidence. Meanwhile, dozens of the publicly-funded executives who exist to cover up the Scottish Government’s failures will appear en masse. 

Today, MSPs will have their first vote on Liam McArthur’s assisted suicide bill. It looks increasingly likely that it will pass. Pam Duncan-Glancy, one of Holyrood’s small number of disabled MSPs, has already echoed the concerns of every disability rights group. 

In yesterday’s Herald, she said: “My whole life is one big exposé, and yet, still, we know that abuse goes on, and if in that situation we cannot protect against even pretty overt abuse or coercion, I just do not see how we can possibly begin to unpick systemic, internalised coercion that could be a result of legislation like this, where there is an option, which would mean it would be easier to die than to continue to live.”

Prostitution, drug addiction, the rights of disabled people not to feel a burden to society. They all involve the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable communities in Scotland. Right now, their fate – in varying stages - is being scrutinised and debated by Holyrood. They will determine whether or not Scotland can accurately call itself a civilised and progressive nation.

Kevin McKenna is a Herald writer and columnist. He’s fiercely proud of never having been approached by any political party or lobbying firm to do their bidding.