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I’m sure the photographer was just trying get in all the food brought to an Irvine food bank by local rich guy, the former Director of the British Council in India, the former Her Majesty’s Trade Commissioner and British Deputy High Commissioner for South Asia, Allan Gemmell, Order of the British Empire 2016 (when Boris Johnson was Foreign Secretary) and now Labour (Starmerite) candidate for Central Ayrshire, but it doesn’t half tell a story.

The report in the Irvine Times is of a sickeningly insincere PR event build on outright lies about Labour’s intent to deal with child poverty and what the SNP, uniquely in the UK have done about it.

Nowhere to be seen, the facts that matter to the electorate in Irvine and across Central Ayrshire:

From the Scottish Government on February 28th:

The First Minister has welcomed analysis which estimates 100,000 children will be kept out of relative poverty in 2024-25 as a result of Scottish Government policies.

Updated modelling of the cumulative impact of policies such as the Scottish Child Payment indicates the relative child poverty rate will be 10 percentage points lower than it would otherwise have been.

https://www.gov.scot/isbn/9781835219850

From the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in January 2024:

On child poverty: ‘Child poverty rates in Scotland (24%) remain much lower than those in England (31%) and Wales (28%) and are similar (if slightly higher) than in Northern Ireland (22%). ‘This is likely to be due, at least in part, to the Scottish Child Payment. This highlights the effect benefits can have in reducing poverty.’

https://www.jrf.org.uk/uk-poverty-2024-the-essential-guide-to-understanding-poverty-in-the-uk

Finally, from Gemmell’s boss Sir Keir Starmer in February 2024:

Keir Starmer will continue austerity. That means keeping vulnerable people in ‘brutalising poverty’ At a recent speech at Labour’s Business Conference, Starmer doubled-down on his new-found commitment to austerity, stating: “We cannot and we will not allow public spending needs, however important, to threaten the stability of our finances”. It’s a rhetoric so ubiquitous we no longer question (or really even notice) what it means. A Jenga tower of abstracted buzzwords. But what Starmer is committing to is a continuation of brutalising poverty.

https://www.bigissue.com/opinion/keir-starmer-austerity-u-turn-labour-poverty-suffering/

Talking-up Scotland costs nothing so donate to our friends at  https://www.broadcastingscotland.scot/donate/ or take out a subscription to the Scots Independent newspaper in which I have a column, at: https://scotsindependent.scot/FWShop/product-category/subscriptions/