No change !

At times SOYMB grows weary at having to repeatedly expose the weakness and failure of those who support Capitalism to reform and eliminate social problems .

We once again read " Despite endless initiatives aimed at halting economic decline, the most deprived communities in Scotland remain among the poorest in the country five years after they were identified "

The number of income-deprived people has risen compared with previous reports in 2004 and 2006, with one in six people defined as income- deprived nationally and almost one in two in the poorest areas. 312,865 are classed as income deprived. The figures, contained in the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation, will raise questions about the effectiveness of policies formulated at both Holyrood and Westminster to lift the most disadvantaged out of poverty.

Robin Tennant, of the Poverty Alliance, the anti-poverty campaign group, said: “One in five people and one in four children in Scotland experience poverty — not enough work has been done.”

SOYMB can only share Natalie Evans' , the editor of Poverty of Ambition, a report into child poverty , pessimism about yet another endeavour to legislate poverty out of existence with the Child Poverty Bill currently making its way through Parliament. A perverse aspect of one of its targets – a reduction in the number of children living in households below 60 per cent of the median income – is that a recession will even appear to reduce child poverty, as the median income falls whilst the incomes of those on benefits do not.

Yet even she fails to distinguish between cause and symptom, "living in a jobless household, low educational attainment and truancy, family breakdown, teenage smoking and obesity, to name but a few. Instead of drawing an arbitrary poverty line and fiddling with income distribution around it, we would do far better to address these root causes".

But these are simply symptoms , not root causes . Capitalism is the cause and without challenging the social system head-on then it is all the tinkering with symptoms that Evans condemns.

SOYMB also notes Noam Chomsky's comments that far-right political groups could use rising poverty to attract support for their extremist policies.

"There is now a mass of people with real grievances, who want answers but are not receiving them. The far-right is providing answers that are completely crazy: that rich liberals are giving their hard-earned money away to illegal immigrants and the shiftless poor."

"A common reaction in elite educated circles and much of the left is to ridicule the right-wing protesters, but that is a serious error. "The correct reaction is to examine our own failures. The grievances are quite real and should be taken seriously."

Chomsky said history showed that it would be a mistake to fail to answer those calls.

"If the protesters are getting crazy answers from the hard-line right-wing extreme, the proper reaction is to provide the right answers, and do something about them," he said. "An organised public can achieve a great deal, as we see right now in many places.

His is certainly not a call to ban BNP-like political parties but an appeal to engage in debate over the issues and the solution.