A WORLD away from the deals being done, hands being wrung and stories being spun in Westminster and Holyrood, there’s a young woman in Clydebank who starves herself to feed her kids. She doesn’t eat because after paying the TV licence, the bills and the kids’ meals, she is left with just £3 in her pocket.

This kind of poverty is a great paradox. In an era of benefit sanctions, the bedroom tax, welfare-related suicides and precarious jobs that barely allow for a hand-to-mouth existence, the woman in Clydebank is not alone.

Numerically, those forced to live an extreme existence are in fact legion: according to a Scottish Government report, 710,000 Scots live in “severe poverty” when housing costs are included. Compare that army, for example, to the 432 individuals who own half of Scotland’s land, or the average of 400 mostly middle-class individuals who give evidence to our parliamentary committees every year. Those who live in poverty are everywhere and nowhere.

Despite these vast numbers, severe poverty in the developed West is mostly an alienating and spirit-breaking way to live. Those who suffer it are far from alone, statistically speaking – but emotionally, they couldn’t be more isolated. Politicians have systematically broken the old support mechanisms in communities and workplaces that allowed our grandparents to endure poverty collectively, with dignity and hope for a better tomorrow. Thanks to decades of propaganda, being poor is treated like a “moral disease".

Most of these stories are suffered silently by anonymous people who gain only partial recognition in the dehumanising statistics, real struggle being lost in big numbers. The woman in Clydebank was a rare example of these stories breaking out into the press, without the usual withering put-downs, raised-eyebrows and contempt for vulnerable people that we’ve come to expect from British journalism.

Perhaps for this reason, when I read her story in the paper it had me crying. And that’s not because I’m a model citizen of Christian charity who is immune to the deadening attitude towards poverty that society imposes on us. Like most people, I can watch news reports about human suffering without always welling up with tears. We’re always angry at the injustice, of course. But when poverty is presented as simply statistics, the human side is lost.

It wasn’t even the material harshness of her story that got to me. What hit me emotionally was when she described how hard she had to work to overcome her sense of shame. Asking for help, admitting a perceived weakness and inability to cope has become a frightening experience. The true horror of it is being forced to choose between your urgent physical needs and the chilling fear of bringing dishonour on yourself and those around you; the stigma of poverty.

Capitalist societies have always produced islands of vast wealth and seas of mass squalor. There’s nothing new in that. The women of my gran’s generation cut off and sold their own hair for money, went to bed hungry when food ran out and fell ill in the cold when they couldn’t heat their homes. But for those women, there were socialist parties, trade unions, even churches for whom “war on poverty” meant war on the social conditions creating it, not war on those experiencing poverty itself. There was dignity and there was hope, for their children and grandchildren if not for themselves.

Now, we’ve had decades of a political consensus called neoliberalism, with a social policy which might be called “poverty shaming”. With redistribution of income off the agenda, attention is focused on the individual: those who used to be considered victims of an absurd economic system are now seemingly to blame. The right-wing press and Tory politicians promote the story that if you’re poor, it’s because you choose to live that way. Tough love is the solution for them: drop your living standards to emergency levels so you’ll choose to work for buttons rather than “being idle”, or perhaps they’ll shunt you into jail to teach you some manners.

So the last thing anyone wants to do is admit being in hardship. And decades of cross-party poverty shaming is what led the starving mother in Clydebank to her dilemma. Tragically, she was only willing to publish her story anonymously, presumably fearing harassment and humiliation from a society where caring is weakness and admitting weakness is wicked.

I wasn’t just upset about the story: I am also angry. I have a message for the anonymous young women: you have nothing whatsoever to feel ashamed about. The true sense of shame should belong to the utterly indifferent politicians and policy-makers who faun over “wealth creators” – the rich, that is – while treating starvation as an afterthought.

New Labour liked to claim that they lifted people out of poverty. And though it was all premised on an unsustainable economic boom, official statistics do record that they achieved a few successes in pensioner and child poverty. But their means-tested approach, using minimal resources to just bump people over the line of official deprivation, often simply reinforced the injustices. Means-testing enforces psychological torment, pitting people like the woman in West Dunbartonshire between their belly and the stigma attached to seeking help.

That’s why Johann Lamont – and Scottish Labour – was so misguided in attacking Scotland’s “something for nothing culture”. Universal entitlement to benefits is not only a cheap way to avoid bureaucracy and get money to people. It avoids the poverty-shaming associated with our morally bankrupt social policy culture. Of course, it's often conveniently forgotten, mostly by bosses who pay wages at a pittance, that over half of those living in poverty are in work.

We must stop deluding ourselves that we live in a social democratic society. Westminster’s stranglehold over social security and the media is a huge problem, but we urgently need to find solutions in the here and now too. People starving in our towns, cities and rural communities is a shame on all of us. If we’d make effort to listen to their stories, we couldn’t possibly remain indifferent.

Extreme poverty in a rich society is not an unfortunate fact of nature. It takes a million acts of political, economic and institutional indifference every single day to fail to notice it all around us. After 2016, independent or not, Scotland must make eliminating poverty our number one priority.

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