Many MSPs should be pausing to give thanks to their colleague Bill Walker even as they are trying to bury him. There are questions still to be asked about why Walker, a thoroughly nasty piece of work who has been convicted on 23 counts of assaulting three ex-wives, ever made it on to the SNP's list of candidates.

Since his conviction, politicians from all sides of the chamber have been, as the BBC always says, "united in their condemnation" of Walker and his tawdry struggle to hang on to his job and his £58,000 salary when he ought instead to have resigned immediately. At the first sight of a camera or a microphone, several MSPs whose constituents had forgotten what they looked and sounded like have been falling over themselves in expressing their outrage.

Perhaps we can now look forward to a similar level of anger from these people when violence against women is next on the agenda. Maybe they could ask the police why they seem more eager to catch people singing dodgy songs at football matches than protecting vulnerable young women from rape and sexual assault in our city centres every weekend.

A bigger scandal than Bill Walker's behaviour was revealed last week and hardly a voice was raised in protest. According to the Office for National Statistics, Glasgow possesses the highest number of workless households in the UK.

This means that in parts of the city, children will reach adulthood never having seen a wage slip in the house or witnessed any member of their family head off to work at night or in the morning. In some of these neighbourhoods, almost nine out of 10 male adults are receiving benefits, and life expectancy can be up almost 20 years lower than in the city's leafier arrondissements barely two miles away.

The reason they die much younger is attributed to the "Glasgow effect", a handy phrase that is now often deployed to absolve the rest of us from any responsibility for such an iniquity.

The Glasgow effect hints that there is nothing much that can be done; it is just one of those social curiosities that come with living in this city. For it seems that life expectancy in UK cities with similar social indicators and patterns of deprivation is higher than in Glasgow. Thus the knife slayings, the heart disease, the cancer rates and the depression that create the Glasgow effect can be neatly boxed up and left for the next academic seeking to complete a doctoral thesis on the subject.

Rightwing types and others who ought to know better are never slow to stick the boot in when figures such as these are released: why can't they get a job – they're all benefit scroungers.

Their favourite narrative is that these people must help themselves before we can help them. It echoes the tendency of Victorian reformers to divide the needy into categories marked "deserving poor" and "scum". It also ignores the fact that many of the richest people in this country have cheated their way to their fortunes and used our tax laws as their own benefit system.

Few other cities in Europe have treated their poor as badly as Glasgow has. The city's wealth was built on the mass migration of Irish and Highlanders throughout the latter half of the 19th century and the construction skills of the indigenous working classes. In return for building the ships and transport infrastructure that made Glasgow one of the richest cities in the world, the workers were harried into overcrowded and disease-ridden slums that were barely fit for rats. They were grossly underpaid by bosses and merchants who grew fat on their labours and who sacked them on a whim. When the Great War arrived, hundreds of thousands of them joined up.

Later, they built the ships and aircraft and produced the munitions that helped defeat Hitler, yet still they were being exploited by their bosses and the government. And when the country had no further use for the skills that built a city and won two wars they simply discarded them and herded them beyond the boundaries into Drumchapel, Easterhouse and a rebuilt Gorbals.

Not a penny more was spent on these dwellings than was necessary to keep them beyond our sight, and so there were no sports centres, swimming pools, retail areas or playparks. Nor were there any enterprise zones and the Labour party all but abandoned them.

For more than 150 years, poor people and working-class people in Glasgow have been treated like animals by the city's entrepreneurs and political leaders. The accumulated effects of the disease, exploitation, slavery and premature death can be seen in their descendants and yet we still accuse them of not helping themselves.

Even today, Glasgow continues to carry the rest of Scotland on its back. The city's tens of millions in business rates and council taxes are routinely used to pay for overblown vanity projects such as the Edinburgh trams and the new Forth road bridge. Glasgow has driven Scotland's economy for centuries, yet capital city status and all the concomitant economic benefits have accrued to the fairy princess on the east coast where one in four children attends a fee-paying school.

The bedroom tax and the assorted other cuts in tax credits will result in more than £250m being taken from the Glasgow economy, according to the Scottish parliament's welfare reform committee.

Leftwing politicians representing most of the city's poorest areas often talk of radical measures being required to address the deprivation in their midst, but they don't know the meaning of the word. "Radical" is sending our most gifted teachers, on enhanced pay structures, into our poorest schools. It is forcing employers to pay wages that can sustain a family and exposing as lies their claims that to do so would lead to unemployment. It is awarding Glasgow a disproportionate share of future spending in return for what the city has given the rest of the country.

At times like this, I weep for my city and the debate on Scottish independence is a mere, distant rumble.