Meeting of the Parliament 04 June 2024
Yes, I accept that point. We need to recognise and acknowledge that, and we then need to think about how we go beyond that and address issues, such as the failure to improve the physical wellbeing of children who sit just above the poverty line, that have not been dealt with in the past 20 or 30 years.
Our vision for the Scottish child payment has to be ambitious, generous and transformative. We need to fulfil the statutory principles laid down in the 2018 act, but we must also go much further by making social security a means of co-production, liberation and real redistribution.
Danny Dorling told the committee that the UK’s
“economic inequality between families did not alter one iota in the years from 1997 to 2010.”—[Official Report, Social Justice and Social Security Committee, 23 May 2024; c 8.]
We have to do better than that, by addressing the causes of poverty and inequality, as well as their consequences. It is a question of justice, of human rights and of humanity, but it is also foundational for everything else that we aspire to do in this place—in this Parliament and beyond, as Carol Mochan has described. Whether it involves climate and environmental action, peace building, equality for the oppressed, growing a thriving economy that prioritises people over profit, achieving reductions in crime, especially violent crime, or reaching the sustainable development goals in Scotland and throughout the world, the success of all that work depends on today’s children growing up in good health and in good housing, happy, well educated and confident—children who are free from the trauma of poverty and all that follows in its wake. The bill starts us on that journey, and we have more to do.
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