Scottish poverty levels 'not improving'

A BBC report out today argues, "Scotland is facing its "most difficult" challenges in tackling poverty in years, campaigners have warned.

The Assembly for Tackling Poverty, which is due to meet in Glasgow, said levels of poverty in Scotland have "not been improving for a number of years".

It said about 250,000 Scottish children were living in low income households.

The assembly will hear from community and voluntary organisers, faith groups, trade unions, academics and policy makers." ( Faith in reforms is a huge part of resistance to the solution: Added MC)

The assembly is part of a four-year project supported by the Big Lottery Fund in Scotland.

(Capitalism is a lottery right enough but it is stacked from the beginning in favour of those already winners:.Added MC)

It aims to support community and voluntary organisations to become more involved in developing anti-poverty policy.

A spokesman said it was now "crucial" to find solutions to the causes of poverty.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-12491459

However well meaning some of this group are, we would have to point out that there is only ever going to be a solution to poverty however one may define it by getting rid of the system which causes it.Capitalism must be destroyed. ( What is Capitalism?)

Official statistics show that despite taxation the distribu¬tion of incomes and wealth remains as it must be under capitalism: concentrated in the hands of a few. The few are rich through their monopoly of the means of life and their returns on their investments as rent, interest and profit; the workers get as wages and salaries little more than enough to keep themselves and their families in efficient working order. State action, such as tax reform and social security benefits, cannot alter these basic inequalities of capitalism any more than they can solve the problems in housing, health and education which arise for workers as a result.

Don't be fooled either by Labour politiians in opposition now positioning themselves as teh champions of the poor.
On 20 July 1946 the late Aneurin Bevan claimed in a speech at Durham that: "when the next election occurs there will be no housing problem in Great Britain for the British working class" (Hansard, 14 July 1948, Col. 1202); and the Labour Party announced that "destitution has been abolished" (Labour and the New Society, 1950, page 5). Merely to recall these claims is to expose the futility of reformism.

The Labour Party has always shown disdain for the Socialist Party of Great Britain's insistence on first convincing the workers of the need for Socialism,(What is Socialism?) choosing instead to put forward reforms in its electoral programmes in order to gain working class support and thus obtain political power. 'The workers want something now', we have always been told, the implication being that a workers' party should imitate the openly capitalist parties and make promises of reforms in order to catch votes. Such reasoning ignores the fact that a party which rises to power on non-socialist votes can only administer capitalism. The fate of successive Labour governments is proof of this.

The question needing to be put to this group is, can capitalism be made to work differently? Or must there be a social revolution to replace capitalism with some other society? (Reform or Revolution?)

MC