(c) sky.com

STV News allowed Jeremy Corbyn to headline a piece yesterday with:

‘We shouldn’t have hungry children in Scotland’

before going on to make the astonishing suggestion that Holyrood desperately needs a Labour Government and then listing a number of accusations of failure by the SNP to remove poverty.

https://stv.tv/news/politics/1408214-corbyn-we-shouldn-t-have-hungry-children-in-scotland/

No opportunity was given to the SNP to respond. They would probably have been too polite for my taste anyway so here’s my answer to Jeremy following on from the obvious statement in my headline. See this from the most recent empirical study of child poverty in the UK from a House of Commons report in December 2015:

‘Once housing costs are taken into account, relative poverty ranges from one in five children in Scotland (21 per cent) to nearly twice this (37 per cent) in London’. (p113)

That twenty-one percent of Scotland’s children live in poverty is a monstrous blemish on the face of a democracy aspiring to much better. That it is higher everywhere else in the UK and nearly twice as high in our globalised golden capital does not excuse it, I know that. The current Scottish government makes nothing of such a comparison. It simply accepts that it is unacceptable and is now doing what it can to remedy the situation. See also from the same report:

‘The trends in one of the key drivers of child poverty – employment – are also encouraging:

The proportion of children in Scotland who live in workless households has decreased rapidly in recent years and is slightly lower than the UK average – only 10.9 per cent of children in Scotland live in workless households compared to 15.8 per cent in 2012 and 11.8 per cent in the UK as a whole;

More than six out of 10 (62.5 per cent) children in Scotland live in households where all adults are in work, making Scotland the region with the most ‘fully working’ households in the UK – for example, only 54.6 per cent of children in England live in households where all adults are in work;

Scotland has the second highest parental employment rate of any region of the UK: 83.2 per cent of people with dependent children are in work. This is driven by very high employment of mothers in couples; 79.6 per cent of whom are in work compared to 71.9 per cent in England.’ (p169)

‘State of the Nation’: Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, presented to House of Commons December 2015 at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/485926/State_of_the_nation_2015__social_mobility_and_child_poverty_in_Great_Britain.pdf

For more detail see:

Despite already having the lowest rate of child poverty in the UK, Scotland will become the first and only part with statutory targets to tackle it

Scotland has lower poverty rates than England: JRF Excerpt 1