Give Tories the bum’s rush at polls

HERE, in 21st-century Scotland, some families can no longer afford packs of nappies, or whole packets of flour or sugar. Instead they have to buy their supplies one item at a time.

In one of the richest countries in the world, more than one in five people lived in poverty even before the Covid-19 pandemic struck.

These are facts and figures that ought to shame those in power.

But the Tories, who had already given us a decade of austerity, are ready to double down on poverty in postpandemic Britain.

As the price of everything goes up and up, and the profits of big energy companies like BP soar to the high heavens, people in the east end of Glasgow and way beyond are being plunged into financial hell.

Cuts in Universal Credit, a failure to keep pace with inflation in other benefits and in wages and an abdication of responsibility in the face of a cost-ofliving crisis has left large swathes of the country in penury.

Poverty causes death, it causes low birth weight, shorter life expectancy, problems with diet and damages mental health. It is a scourge.

We have the means and the methods to address this life sentence of poverty and ill-health inflicted on a fifth of the population.

An immediate response to the huge rise in household energy costs is simply to tax the companies that have made a massive profit out of the sharp spike in wholesale costs.

Companies like BP, which posted its best quarter of profits in a decade yesterday, can well afford to pay.

Even their chief executive says that a windfall tax would not affect their plans to invest.

Shorn of excuses, the Tories are still resisting the idea of giving people a real boost of £600 to offset their rising energy bills.

Not a pretendy loan and a council tax discount that wastes money helping the relatively well-off in already insulated homes.

Following Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s car-crash interview yesterday with Susanna Reid on Good Morning Britain, the Tories will go into council elections across Scotland and the length of Britain tomorrow also having to cope with the scandal of Partygate hanging over them.

But it is the scandal of poverty that is a greater disgrace and a bigger shame on the nation.

Come tomorrow the Conservatives do not deserve a cross in any box or a number next to their names in any ward, in any council area, in any country in the United Kingdom.