Scottish child poverty can only be eliminated with independence

The Guardian newspaper has reported that Labour’s “flagship child poverty policy” has been delayed until at least the autumn, pushing tens of thousands more children into poverty in the meantime. It was because this policy was supposed to be unveiled in a few months that the Labour party justified voting against an SNP motion in the House of Commons in the early weeks of Starmer’s government to abolish the two child cap on benefits. It can’t be that much of a flagship then.

The paper reports that the decision to push back the strategy comes amid Treasury concerns about the cost implications of ending the two-child limit on benefits and questions inside No 10 over the political benefits of scrapping it. The policy had been expected to be published in spring and was supposed to have included a recommendation to abolish the two child cap on benefits. However Keir Starmer’s chief of staff and main advisor, Morgan McSweeney, is said to be opposing moves to abolish the two child cap on benefits on the grounds that doing so would not deliver enough political capital to the Labour party with the wider public.

Saying that the cost of lifting children out of poverty outweighs the political benefit, and so you’re not going to lift children out of poverty, is a sentiment that is so cruel and pathological that it beggars belief.

And yet someone in the Labour Party is deliberately leaking it to the press because they think it reflects well on them to present themselves as cruelly condemning children to misery, reduced opportunity and chances of educational success. The performative cruelty is precisely the point. It’s a way that they can tell their multi-millionaire donors and backers that they are more than willing to be vile and nasty in order to protect the wealth and interests of the rich.

If you will only lift children out of poverty if there’s a political benefit in it for you, you don’t care about child poverty, you only care about your own political career. It makes you a narcissist and a sociopath. We are governed by people who believe that normal human standards of compassion, empathy, and care do not apply to them.

Doing the right and moral thing is not a question of political accountancy. Only a sociopath thinks it should be. Morgan Mc Sweeney seems to think that a child poverty policy should be a policy for creating child poverty.

Experts and anti-poverty advocates all agree that abolishing the the two child cap on benefits, which was introduced in 2016 under Theresa May, would be the single most effective measure to tackle child poverty, which is continuing to rise in every part of the UK, except Scotland thanks to the Scottish Child Payment. 24% of children in Scotland are living in poverty, a decrease from 26% in the previous year. The Scottish Government is spending millions on trying to mitigate the UK’s impoverishment of children and families, through measures such as housing support and the Scottish Child Payment. That contributes to child poverty in Scotland now being significantly lower than in England or Wales

In England the equivalent figure was 31%, and in Wales 28%. It is projected to rise even higher in those countries. According to anti-poverty campaigners, about 100 children are pushed into poverty every day by the two child cap, meaning up to 20,000 more children could could be affected by the six-month delay to the UK Government’s child poverty policy.

Anas Sarwar, who prior to the Westminster general election claimed to be opposed to the two child benefit cap, has defended his party’s refusal to abolish the cap saying that abolishing the cap alone will not get rid of child poverty, an intelligence insulting obtuse argument if ever there was one.

How is that country before party thing going again?

Labour’s equivocation on child poverty is a compelling argument for Scottish independence. Comparing rates of child poverty across different developed economies is fraught with difficulty due to differing statistical methods and definitions, child poverty is often defined as being when a child lives in a household whose income is under 60% of the national median. It should be noted that median income in Scandinavian countries is considerably higher than it is in the UK. However whichever definition of child poverty is used, there is widespread agreement that the rate of child poverty is considerably higher in the UK than it is in comparable European economies.

According to a UNICEF report published in 2024, child poverty increased by far most in the United Kingdom (almost 20%) than in any other developed European economy. This means that around half a million more children were in poverty in 2019–2021 in the UK than seven years earlier.

Recent decisions by the Labour Government will push thousands more children into poverty. The DWP itself estimates that between 50,000-100,000 more children will be pushed into poverty as a result of the cuts to disability benefits announced earlier this year. Anti-poverty group the Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimates that without substantive action to change course on the part of the UK Government, 4.7 million children will be in poverty by the end of this parliament, 300,000 more than when the Labour government came to power.

The Scottish Government’s attempts to tackle child poverty are laudable and have had significant success, although the reduction in child poverty in Scotland still lags behind the Scottish Government’s target. The Scottish Parliament lacks the full range of powers necessary to tackle child poverty effectively and to reduce it to the much lower prevalence found in Scandinavia. Operating as it does largely within the constraints of a fixed budget determined by Westminster and without full control of macroeconomic, tax, and benefit powers, the Scottish Government can only mitigate the harm caused by Westminster policies. It cannot tackle the root causes.

All too often the funds needed to tackle child poverty in Scotland must come out of other areas of the Scottish budget, leading Anas Sarwar to stand up at FMQs and make his sneery face about ‘SNP cuts’. Only with independence could the Scottish Government have the powers over the Scottish economy needed to reduce child poverty to nominal levels.

Independence would also give the people of Scotland the power to vote out of office a political party which refused to tackle child poverty as it felt there would not be enough of a political benefit in doing so. If we want to live in a nation where compassion, empathy and human decency are not regarded as political weakness, we can only do so with independence. Given the current political trajectory of the UK, things are only set to get much much worse if we remain shackled to Westminster and the hard right vandals of Reform take power.

Scotland’s funding is determined as a consequence of decisions made in Westminster. Those decisions made are not based on what Scotland needs or what her people vote for. They are based upon what another country chooses, or rather what another country chooses as refracted and distorted by the unfair first past the post system so beloved of the Labour and Conservative parties.

The appalling rates of child poverty in Scotland, as in the UK as a whole, are the result of political choices, They are choices Scotland’s people did not make and they are not inevitable. An independent Scotland will be free to make different choices and to learn from the example of other nations which are tackling child poverty far more successfully and effectively.

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