By any instrument you wish to measure it, 2014 has been an outstanding year for Glasgow. As our biggest city is the boiler house that heats the nation’s economy and culture, that means that this has been a year like no other for the rest of the country too. The Commonwealth Games were successfully delivered with so much style and zip that an event that was in danger of becoming a sporting irrelevance has now been revivified.

Glasgow also hosted the UK and Commonwealth’s main commemorations of the start of the First World War, the MTV Europe Music Awards and the BBC Sports Personality of the Year. Yet the city’s proudest moment was announced just last week but to curiously little media fanfare. Glasgow has formulated a new policy that represents a major victory in the war to reduce the gap between rich and poor. Companies bidding for contracts from Glasgow city council must now demonstrate their commitment to paying the Glasgow living wage.

If this were to be rolled out across every council in the UK, the lives of multitudes of our fellow citizens would improve dramatically. These are people whose daily struggles to dodge being dragged below the poverty line shame the rest of us in this, one of the most affluent and resource-rich nations on the planet.

We know it won’t, of course, because the interests of corporations that want to grow their brands, as well as their directors’ dividends, for the least possible outlay will always hold sway below Britain’s invisible moral equator. This is the line, probably just below the English Midlands, at which the morally bankrupt values of neoliberalism hold sway.

Thus votes and debates in Westminster can be bought in the ancient cottage industry of giving English Tory MPs shares in interested companies. The Westminster market in the share holdings of private healthcare companies is particularly buoyant.

The Glasgow initiative on the living wage is both visionary and enlightened. Companies seeking to secure council contracts must now be prepared to shed light on their attitudes towards their employees. Do they pay the Glasgow living wage? Can they demonstrate that they do not use exploitative zero-hours contracts? Have they ever engaged in the pernicious practice of blacklisting members of trade unions? The answers to these questions will now carry a greater weight in the tendering process.

Glasgow’s council leader, Gordon Matheson, has laid down a template that every company that aspires to decency and integrity, ought to deploy. “In recent years, we have taken steps to ensure that the city weathered the worst of the economic conditions, and as a result we have emerged with a much healthier and more diverse economy. But not everyone benefits from our improved position and we want to do everything possible to ensure that in future they will,” he said. “The responsibility to tackle the scandal of in-work poverty is something that is shared by the council and all of the contractors and suppliers with whom we do business.”

The city’s initiative shames two institutions close to my heart but whose recent conduct on paying workers a fair day’s wages has been a disgrace: Celtic Football Club and the British Labour party. Last month, Celtic, the richest sporting organisation in Scotland, had to be dragged screaming and protesting by its own fans to a decision to pay the living wage to its full-time employees. The club still refused to budge on a similar rate for its hundreds of part-time workers and was still bleating about remaining competitive and not allowing its wage policy to be influenced by a third party (the Living Wage Foundation). This club was established by poor people for poor people and receives loyal backing still from many poor people. The entire board of directors, a gentrified assortment of CV-embellishers, ought to be made to resign immediately.

And what are we to make of the British Labour party? In the last hours of the Smith commission deliberations, their representatives, taking their orders from the new Lab-Con pact, refused point-blank to accommodate the terrifying possibility of devolving the setting of the minimum wage to Holyrood.

Thus the party of The People, for The People, shafted The People one more time. As one official observer of the Smith Delusion memorably told me: “Seeing all welfare powers being taken away at the last minute and seeing Labour argue against the devolution of the minimum wage are things I don’t think I’ll ever forget.”

This is how wage poverty works for those of us who are bewildered at the notion of how two salaries in one household with a couple of children can yet be insufficient. Real wages in the last decade have increased by only around 2% while the cost of living has risen by around 12%. The cartelism of our major energy suppliers has seen gas and electricity prices spiral.

New social housing has all but ground to a halt following the big Thatcher home ownership lie and now people have to find massive deposits to secure their first homes.

Corporate giants such as Tesco issue profits warnings, as it did this month, because it only made £1.2bn for the last financial year. Yet when two of its employees, one a checkout assistant and the other a delivery driver, are paid so little that they cannot between them make their salaries last the entire month once two children have been fed and all the bills have been paid, Tesco shrugs its shoulders: “At least we provide lots of jobs.”

This is said in a way that suggests big-business owners are all providing employment out of their innate sense of benevolence and munificence. Bollocks. What they mean is this: “Until such times as we can make our money without them, we will, unfortunately, have to pay people.” And until that time they will seek to pay people as little as they are allowed to get away with. Under the Lab-Con alliance, they are being allowed to get away with a lot.