THAT it's a case of hard times for the poor in today's Scotland is not surprising in itself, but the latest snapshot of our nation is doubly shocking.
Not only do the statistics point to the widening gulf between haves and have nots, but there is a dismal tendency among those in between to blame the poor for their poverty.
A third of our citizens have neither savings nor pensions and almost the same proportion account for just two per cent of personal wealth. Pause and let that sink in. At the top end two per cent own 17 per cent of the loot. The iconic figure embodied in John McGrath's theatre company used to be based on seven per cent owning 84% of the wealth. We used to dream that this would improve, by which we meant narrow.
Instead, the gap has widened and attitudes have hardened. It's difficult to say what's more shocking, the irrefutable evidence of the poverty gap, or the fact that 25% of the population disagree that Ministers should try to reverse this, or that a majority blame the poor for their poverty and think it's caused by laziness, and that those on benefits should feel shame. We can only shudder. What has happened to us? What has happened to what used to be called common humanity?
Beveridge identified squalor, want, idleness and disease as the great evils. On disease we have made progress and through the succeeding decades we thought squalor, want and idleness would follow. But we have reached a point in the 21st century were idleness has been conquered and recast - almost laughably so - and yet this has not solved the evils of want or squalor. We have gone from the biblical acceptance of the poor always being with us to a new paradigm, that the working poor will always be with us, as they struggle by on the minimum wage (or less if you work for a major Glasgow pub company) or, worse, they juggle multiple low-paid jobs, some of them on zero hours contracts.
There is some cause for hope. Some 80% of people think the gap between rich and poor is too great. The Scottish Government can and should do its bit, although appointing a "poverty czar" sounds like more of a gimmick than a solution.
We don't doubt the passion and indignation of Alex Neil, who writes in these pages today, but the Secretary for Social Justice, Communities and Pensioner's Rights simply doesn't wield the levers to change much.
His Cabinet colleague for Education, Angela Constance, may wield more power, but it will take a generation for the effect to come through. It is vital nonetheless that her equal opportunities campaign for schools bears fruit. Handing extra resources to schools in poorer areas will be a challenge, as middle class parents elsewhere are a formidable lobby and will resist any impression that better off schools are starved of resources.
Ms Constance is right to opt for the carrot rather than the stick when it comes to dealing with local authorities and under-performing schools. The latter may or may not suffer from poor leadership or teaching, but even if these two vital attributes were in full supply they cannot fully overcome the lack of home support that comes from poverty and the lack of aspiration.
We need this to work, so that in 2035 The Herald is not lamenting the same social and economic division in our nation.
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