It is not every day you receive a telephone call from a former Prime Minister making you aware of a policy announcement expected to have some sort of impact on your line of work.

That was my lot on Thursday as the retiring Member of Parliament for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, Gordon Brown, called to inform me that the Labour Party planned to announce plans in an effort to end the need for foodbanks.

This week, The Trussell Trust has been coming to terms with the receipt of 117,689 referrals for people to Scottish foodbanks - over 36,000 including for children. Imagine Edinburgh's Murrayfield Stadium sold out, then double it and you are beginning to get an idea of just how many people received a three day supply of nutritionally-balanced emergency food from The Trussell Trust in the last financial year. In a newspaper article yesterday, Gordon Brown wrote: "Scotland now has more people relying on foodbanks than London, despite London having twice the population."

After releasing our statistics, we were confronted with a tsunami of cynicism in the form of efforts to discredit the resilience of our data collection, questions regarding whether the extent of provision was supply-led rather than demand-driven and suggestions that foodbanks are over-stating this growth in need for political reasons. It did not end there. While on BBC Radio Scotland on Thursday, I was situated alongside a journalist who essentially blamed families experiencing financial fatigue for their own misfortune by suggesting they are guilty of monetary mismanagement and, on Friday, we had Katie Hopkins suggesting, in her column for The Sun, that the "idle become voucher tourists, moving around to score free nappies and deodorants they can flog for fags and booze."

You really could not make it up and it is so detached from people like Suzanne who, along with her husband David, was a high-earning home-owner working in Central London prior to the recession and, after a domino effect of crises, was driven from middle-class to malnutrition forcing her to give up breastfeeding her six-week old son. Suzanne and her family now live in Paisley and she was incandescent regarding Hopkins' comments when we spoke this weekend. Suzanne is highly articulate, intelligent and qualified but, like many, does not fit into the neat policy pigeon-hole as her family struggle to access the welfare provision they have invested in for years.

This week, the Conservative candidate Eric Pickles claimed that his Government's decision to allow Job Centres to refer people to foodbanks contributed to the explosion in demand for emergency food. Interestingly, the data collected by Dundee foodbank, which I used to manage, showed that just 3% of the 7,050 people who used the foodbank in the last year were referred by the Job Centre.

I was also questioned on BBC Radio Scotland this week about the supply-led argument. It is fascinating that, after running Dundee foodbank for seven years, we provided food to over 3,373 men, women and children in 2012/13 but the figure was almost 6,000 by the end of 2013/14. Can we really argue that our marketing skills achieved something in our seventh year that we previously couldn't, contributing to a 56% increase in demand year-on-year, or was it more related to the administration of a number of welfare reforms that were introduced in April 2013?

Scottish Conservative MSP Jackson Carlaw also recited the best form of welfare is work maxim on STV this week, but that argument only has merit when there are enough employment opportunities available and that afford sustainable incomes enabling people to survive.

I discussed my concern about the unhelpful language of 'ending the need' for foodbanks with the former Prime Minister as well as during a televised interview on Scotland 2015 on Wednesday night for fear that it misses the real issue. During the recent televised Scottish Leaders' Debate, Scottish Labour Party leader, Jim Murphy, talked about investing £175 million to get rid of the need for foodbanks. Presenter James Cook immediately forced him to clarify what he meant saying "You'll get rid of foodbanks?" Jim Murphy responded by insisting he was talking about the 'need' for foodbanks but this highlights how easily the current rhetoric can be misunderstood.

It is unsurprising, but is profoundly unhelpful, that some have sought to co-opt the term 'foodbanks' as a pejorative term in a way that has the potential to alienate their greatest potential allies and heap shame upon the people who rely upon them during times of crises. When Jim Murphy and I met recently in Edinburgh Central foodbank, he sought to reassure me that food poverty is the source of their concern.

However, the Scottish Labour 2015 manifesto clearly states: "In 2011, there was one Trussell Trust foodbank in Scotland - as of November 2014, there were 48 in 27 Scottish local authorities. We will make foodbanks history in Scotland..." Their aim seems entirely clear and, again, appears to fundamentally miss the real issue. By contrast, a rival party manifesto outlines plans to eradicate food poverty and, despite mentioning foodbanks, does so without disdain.

We need a rebirth of the socially just politics of Beveridge, Bevan and Benn and the working class agitation of Keir Hardie who once claimed: "My work has consisted of trying to stir up divine discontent with wrong." The tectonic plates of the political stratosphere in Scotland, and the United Kingdom, are shifting and we are on the cusp of inviting new and more diverse voices into our political discourse. The colour of their political stripes will not be my primary concern. My only bias will be for a politician, or a group of politicians, who speak out against the demonisation of the poor and one who is willing to engage in dialogue the men, women and children experiencing food poverty as a route to productive policy development. When we achieve that, I believe we will be on the right track.