In March 1999 Tony Blair committed his government to eradicating child poverty by 2020. Wendy Alexander banged on the same drum and published her own initiative for Scotland with a pledge to stamp out the scourge in a generation. As grand political ambitions go, they didn’t come much bigger than this and for a relatively new Labour Government, it was simply an expression of ambitions embedded in the party’s founding principles. But ten years on, those targets have, so far, fallen well short and we still have more than a quarter of a million Scottish children living in poverty. And given that most poverty is generational, those desperate children already living in households that depend on benefits, hand outs and hand me downs can look forward to inheriting their dire family circumstances and then passing them onto their own children and theirs after that. Poverty is an outrage in today’s society when we have the ‘super rich’ pushing the relative poverty of those at the bottom into the realms of a Dickensian Britain, where even the middle classes are feeling hard done by, and with an encroaching credit crunch, can quote the price of a loaf of bread and a pint of milk. The fact that a Labour Government has managed to fail even its own targets in reducing poverty is an indictment. No party has a monopoly on eradicating social inequality but it is imperative that the SNP Government in Scotland grasps this particular nettle. For a party that believes this country can stand tall and alone, it is more than just a political imperative, it is a necessity for survival. If the SNP wants to have any hope of achieving not only an independent Scotland but one that doesn’t permanently have its hand outstretched then it will have to do more than just manage to cushion the poor, it will have to lift them out of the trap. The SNP plans to create a wealthier and fairer Scotland with a framework for tackling the root causes of poverty by offering help to people to overcome barriers to work, such as lack of skills, ill health or discrimination on grounds of race, age or gender. It will reveal its strategy in the next few months. And let’s hope for something radical. In announcing its plans, it would do well to remember that there have been a plethora of worthy initiatives in the past, designed to alleviate the effects of poverty but they have been sticking-plaster remedies. We shouldn’t be bemoaning the fact that funding in the voluntary sector is drying up, we should be asking why we still have the need to be propping up people without homes, children without food and pensioners without heat. Poverty needs to be prevented not managed. Making poverty history in Scotland should be central to everything a government does, not just an aspirational target which ameliorates the consciences of the middle classes. Our society may not yet be broken but it is deeply divided with an ever widening chasm between the rich and poor. Poverty seeps through every failing we have; the fattest people are the poorest, the least educated are the poorest, the most criminal are the poorest, the most ill are the poorest and the most vulnerable are the poorest. Tackling poverty isn’t just a national feel-good, it’s a straightforward economic absolute. Poverty is a stain on Scotland that any self-respecting government should want to address but it takes courage. When Bill Clinton was asked how he had been able to override the objections of many in his own party to his sweeping programme of welfare reform he said: “I’ve always known poor folks. I’ve just never thought they were helpless.”

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