IN the three Scottish Parliament elections that the Scottish National Party has won since 2007, including the outright majority victory of 2011 that the electoral system was designed specifically to prevent, SNP governments have put tackling poverty at the front and centre of its campaigns promoting itself as a party of social justice.

In fact in its 2011 election manifesto it went further than broad-brush commitments to focus on tackling poverty or treating it even as a priority. They said that an SNP government was “committed to eradicating child poverty.”

Following the recent publication of data on poverty and income inequality in Scotland, that commitment reminded me of a quote from the TV series Blackadder Goes Forth, when Blackadder was describing the “one tiny flaw” in the plan to avoid war in Europe in 1914 by having two opposing super-armies. “It’s bollocks,” said Blackadder.

The new figures painted a drab and miserable picture of 180,000 children living in relative poverty in Scotland before housing costs — a jump of 2 per cent from the previous year’s figure. 

The picture got a lot worse after housing costs were taken into consideration, with another 50,000 children being added to the numbers of those in relative poverty, raising the total ratio to almost one child in four.

While these figures present a bleak background to any portrayal of Scotland as a country of fairness, justice and equality in 2018, analysis commissioned by the Scottish government forecasts a near future that will have us reminiscing over today as being a time of income equality.

The three main indicators of poverty are all predicting rises of 60 per cent and above in rates of child poverty between now and 2031. 

Relative poverty, the gap between low and middle-income households, is expected to increase from 23 per cent to 38 per cent. Absolute poverty, the measure of whether the income of the poorest households is simply keeping up with the pace of inflation, will rise from 20 per cent to 32 per cent. Finally, those in persistent poverty, children living in poverty for at least three of the preceding four years, will go up from 10 per cent to 16 per cent.

To put it bluntly, more and more children will live in households that are becoming poorer, that will see the gap between them and children living in middle-class households becoming wider, and will stay poorer for longer and find it harder and harder to get themselves out of poverty.

These facts and demographic predictions all fly in the face of not only the SNP manifesto commitments but the statutory obligations that the Scottish Parliament placed upon itself last November, via an SNP Bill, to achieve targets of less than 10 per cent of children living in households experiencing relative poverty by 2030 and less than 5 per cent in households with absolute and persistent poverty in the same timescale.

The Poverty and Inequality Commission reported to the Scottish government in February that the biggest impact on child poverty could be made in three specific areas; work and earnings, housing and social security.

The SNP government, however, appears to be, by what it has so far done, not only not having an impact on the causes of poverty in these areas but is actually consolidating and widening that poverty.

As regards earnings, with the retail price index rate of inflation running at 3.6 per cent, the Scottish government has set its public-sector pay policy at 3 per cent for those staff earning under £36,500 and even this had to be wrung out of it as the price it would be forced to pay by the six Green MSPs to get its Budget through Parliament. The SNP’s own desire was to cap the 3 per cent rise at £30,000. 

The political and economic reality is that the SNP has committed itself to another year of pay cuts and Tory austerity.

On housing, while Audit Scotland has intimated that there will likely be a requirement for half a million new homes to be built in Scotland by 2038, the SNP has said that it is only committing to 35,000 new homes being built for social rent in the lifetime of this parliament.

Finally, it would only take the SNP government to use its new welfare powers, as promoted by Scottish Labour, to the extent of increasing child benefit by £5 a week to take 30,000 Scottish children out of poverty. 

Last Thursday the SNP government gave its response to Labour’s proposal which was to announce that it would “work towards introducing a new income supplement by 2022.” 

Four years to wait and not, one notices, a new income supplement, but only a working towards one. Rather than protecting children it appears easier to use them as the friendly fire casualties in a constitutional argument.

The three Scottish government ministers who have the power to make children’s lives better — Nicola Sturgeon, Derek Mackay and Angela Constance — have a simple decision to make. 

Is it their intention to take those political actions which will lift Scottish children out of the stultifying grip of poverty, or when the SNP talk of “historic milestones” in abolishing child poverty are they like Asquith, Grey and Kitchener in August 1914 simply talking “bollocks?”