Westminster and Holyrood are culpable for the scandal of one million Scots languishing in poverty

Daily Record Political Editor Paul Hutcheon says the lack of urgency in tackling the poverty epidemic is alarming.

No one has clean hands when it comes to apportioning blame for Scotland’s poverty scandal. The most culpable are successive Tory Prime Ministers whose policies over the past fourteen years tipped ordinary people into hardship.

They introduced the bedroom tax, punished the poor with the two child cap and demonised social security claimants. Tory Ministers also forced people on welfare to undergo degrading and cruel work assessments in a bid to get them off the rolls.

Keir Starmer has only been Prime Minister for three months and he is already open to the criticism of not being ambitious enough. He stubbornly refuses to lift the two child cap or to draw a line under the vindictive system put in place by the Tory DWP.

He wants to lift millions of kids out of poverty but will be unable to do so if larger families continue to be punished.

The Scottish Government’s record is also patchy as child poverty levels have barely moved since they swept to power in 2007. Introducing the Scottish Child Payment was a welcome antidote to the judgmental, finger-pointing approach of Westminster. It has redistributed money into the pockets of low income families and is here to stay.

But the SNP Government has not come close to following through on its rhetoric of “eradicating” child poverty. They fund pro-wealthy policies like the council tax and have an abysmal record on housing, which is directly tied to rising poverty rates.

Their boast about “lifting” 100,000 kids out of poverty was also nonsense and they ditched this claim when it was exposed.

Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar has still to prove he would do a better job in this area. He used to support a 50p rate of income tax for millionaires and a £40 a week SCP. Both have been dropped and the absence of an alternative strategy is glaring.

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The Joseph Rowntree report is correct on the central point in this debate: social security is key to cutting poverty rates. The last Labour Government used tax credits and the welfare system to lift millions out of poverty. Starmer should do the same.

The time for rhetoric has stopped. London and Edinburgh should unite in common cause to help Scotland’s poor.

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