AT FIRST Minister’s Questions this week Nicola Sturgeon was challenged on the issue of educational attainment in Scotland, with a focus on the lower level of success seen in our poorest communities.

It’s a very fair question. As with health, housing, economic opportunities and many other issues, Scotland has a gulf of inequality which should be unacceptable to us all. There is always justification for pushing a Scottish Government, regardless of which party is in power, to do more to close this gap and secure better life chances for the people who live in deprived areas.

But I have to admit that it was frankly sickening to hear these important questions coming from those who are determined to make that deprivation worse over the coming years.

During the election campaign I asked Ruth Davidson whether the Conservative Party had even bothered to calculate the number of children who would be pushed further into poverty as a result of the proposed £12 billion of extra welfare cuts. She had no answer of course, because her party committed to this figure without any idea which benefits they would cut or by how much.

So when, in a rare opportunity to ask my own question during FMQs, I asked whether there is any assessment of the likely impact on Scotland from these cuts, the First Minister had to answer that the impact could not yet be calculated.

How can a UK government get away with this? Over months of questioning during the election campaign, how can they be taken seriously promising this dramatic cut from the incomes of the poorest people in society without bothering to figure out who’ll be the first to suffer? More to the point, how can a party which behaves in this way toward the welfare system be taken seriously enough to win an election?

We in Scotland can’t afford to ignore that question simply because the Tories didn’t win here. Nor can we afford only to demand control of our social security system; much as I want to see that it won’t be done overnight and it may not be achieved before the UK Government has done its worst.

Besides, even with control of our own affairs, we would have missed an opportunity to prevent these cuts from taking place at all, north and south of the Border. Surely if empathy and compassion guide our politic,s as I believe they do, we in Scotland have a responsibility to build a powerful movement of opposition to the welfare cuts, and an opportunity to give leadership to that movement.

So we do need to ask ourselves, how did we get to this point? How did a country which was once faced with debt, destruction and grief after the Second World War and which responded by building a welfare state to be proud of, allow it to be dismantled?

Part of the answer lies in the language which has been used about poverty and about those who claim benefits. For many years we have seen nothing less than a propaganda war against the welfare state, and a disturbingly successful one at that. From false distinctions between “deserving” and “undeserving poor” (nobody ever makes much fuss about the undeserving rich!) to the more recent language of “strivers and skivers” or that well-worn divisive phrase “hard-working families”, debate around welfare and poverty have been twisted to stigmatise and blame people in poverty. It has become hard to believe that this was once a country where politicians on the left and on the right spoke proudly of a society which provided for all its citizens from the cradle to the grave.

Earlier in the week I had the privilege of hosting an event at Holyrood for the Poverty Alliance, at which they launched the next phase of their Stick Your Labels campaign, aimed at challenging this stigma.

Stigmatising people in poverty matters because each one of us deserves to be treated as a human being, with our basic dignity respected. But it also matters because it facilitates the further attacks which are to come against the welfare state. By de-humanising people in poverty, the Tories encourage people to see the benefits system as something to resent rather than something to be proud of. By making the system ever more stressful and humiliating for people instead of empowering and respectful, they further this same goal.

If we’re to build a strong opposition to these welfare cuts – and I believe we can – we must also rebuild a culture which is proud to show care and compassion, we must recapture belief in the value of a welfare state, and we must assert consistently that everyone’s dignity matters to us, not only “hard-working families”.

Please read more about the Stick Your Labels campaign at povertyalliance.org/policy_campaigns/syl