9 hours ago
Anti-indy media fears success shows Scotland trumps Westminster
Social Justice Secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville has announced that the Scottish Government will end the two-child benefit cap in March next year. While Keir Starmer hums and haws and gets his minions to leak to the press that he is looking at lifting the cap without committing himself to anything concrete, the SNP and the Scottish Government get on with doing it.
Somerville said: "The Scottish Government has consistently called on the UK Government to end the two-child cap. Reports suggest that they are looking at the impact it is having. But the evidence is clear, and families and Scotland can't wait any longer for the UK Government to make up its mind to do the right thing and scrap the cap once and for all.'
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The controversial cap was introduced by the Conservatives under Theresa May (below) in 2017. It denies child allowances in Universal Credit and tax credits to third or subsequent children born after April 2017. The cap has been blamed for being the single biggest factor in the rise in child poverty in the UK.
(Image: Hannah McKay/PA Wire)Almost one third of children across the UK are classified as living in relative poverty, 70% of whom live in households where at least one parent is in work. According to anti-poverty charity the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, current levels of poverty are around 50% higher than they were in the 1970s.
Thanks to the Scottish Child Payment, introduced in February 2021, Scotland is the only part of the UK where the rate of child poverty is decreasing. The Scottish Government is hamstrung by the limitations of the devolution settlement and cannot mitigate entirely the pernicious effects of UK Government tax, benefit, and economic policies.
While child poverty in Scotland remains a serious problem, 22% of Scottish children were assessed as living in poverty in 2023/24, down from 26% the previous year. This is significantly lower than the child poverty rates in other parts of the UK. 31% of children in England and Wales are assessed as living in poverty, a figure that increases to 36% in the West Midlands. Unlike in Scotland, the rate of child poverty in England and Wales continues to rise.
The reduction in child poverty in Scotland is a remarkable success for the Scottish Government. It is largely due to the introduction of the Scottish Child payment, which, unlike Westminster administered benefits, is not limited to the first two children in a family.
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Professor Danny Dorling of Oxford University said that the Scottish Child Payment was responsible for the biggest reduction in inequality caused by a single policy change since the collapse of the Berlin Wall. He said that he was unable to find any other policy which has had as big an impact on reducing inequality as the Scottish Child Payment.
Yet the Scottish Government gets very little credit for this in the Scottish or British media, as Professor Dorling noted: "It's a remarkable story and the second remarkable story is how it hasn't been reported."
It's not reported in England because Scotland might as well be the moon as far as the London-centric media is concerned. It's not reported in Scotland because Scotland's laughably imbalanced anti-independence media has an existential terror of reporting anything successful in Scotland for fear this might lead people to believe that Scotland can actually do better than Westminster at governance.
Or worse, lead them to think that perhaps with independence Scotland could do even better. Note how BBC Scotland framed the news earlier this that Scotland is the only part of the UK where the rate of child poverty is falling. The BBC's headline was "Scotland misses targets on reducing child poverty."
The news that the rate of child poverty in England and Wales was much higher and was rising was buried deep within a piece which did not explicitly spell out that Scotland is the only part of the UK where child poverty is falling; a Scottish success was spun as a failure.
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This tells us that a policy of boosting support for independence through good governance in a devolved government is never going to succeed, because the anti-independence media in Scotland, which is the overwhelming majority of media outlets in Scotland, will continue to loudly trumpet all the Scottish Government's failures and will either ignore its successes or find some angle to spin those as failures too. No doubt the same will happen with the new Two Child Limit Payment.
The Scottish media has almost ignored the introduction of the Scottish Adult Disability Payment, whose streamlined, medically based assessment system is far less stressful and demeaning for disabled people than the complex and unnecessarily cruel assessment for the Personal Independence Payment which it replaced. No doubt the same will happen with the new Two Child Limit Payment, unless there are teething problems with the new benefit, in which case the Scottish media will be screaming SNP failure from the rafter
In another Scottish success story which is being ignored, a new study has found that Scotland has been the top destination for foreign direct investment in the UK outside of London for a decade.
Figures from EY – one of the 'big four' accounting firms – showed that in 2024 Scotland attracted 15.8% of the UK projects targeted for foreign direct investment (FDI), up from 14.4% in 2023 and above its decade average of 11.5%.
