AT social occasions these past 18 months or so, where other like-minded, hand-wringing, lefty types are gathered, I’ve rehearsed and re-heated my best anti-Donald Trump lines dutifully. As usual, most of them had probably been dreamt up long before I mangled them: we had better all look up the life insurance policies; the Ku Klux Klan have expressed deep concern that Trump is making them look moderate; and, after tomorrow, will Mexico suddenly rocket up the Tripadvisor charts and become the planet’s most desirable place to live?

Yet, the people who propelled Trump’s tanks to the front of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue are the people we all like to think we represent, are they not? They are the working-class men and women of America who were sold a dream, only to discover they had been fed a lie. They are the people who were told, time after time, that if they would just give Obama, the Bushes, Clinton, Reagan, Carter, Nixon, Johnson and Kennedy four more years, they would all begin to share in the spoils of the richest and greatest nation on earth.

And when their jobs disappeared and the raw materials they built their towns around began to be imported far more cheaply by their star-spangled factory owners they realised what patriotism bought them: bugger all. They were spoiling for reprisals against the ruling classes who bought their acquiescence for a few blasts of Hail to the Chief and pictures of lone buglers playing the Last Post over the graves of their servicemen.

They didn’t care that the only man to speak their language, one who didn’t patronise them and who offered them a chance to strike back at the government establishment which had betrayed them, was big, mad Donald Trump. You can forgive a man a lot if he gives you the tools to take revenge against your tormentors.

In calm, liberal, enlightened and diverse Scotland, who will speak the language of the tens of thousands of our own people who have been given a lie when they were promised a dream by generations of so-called left-wing governments? Who will adequately represent them? Inevitably, someone will realise that so much resentment and such a palpable sense of having been betrayed can be gathered up and channelled into sweeping the old, well-heeled and cautious establishment out of power. When that person comes along we had better hope that it isn’t our version of Donald Trump.

Yesterday, a report by the End Child Poverty coalition revealed that in parts of Scotland one in three children is being reared in poverty. Across the country there are 220,000 children living in poverty. In Glasgow, our biggest and most vital city, more than 34 per cent of our children are poor. The report states that, across the UK, 3.5 million children are living in poverty. The report comes just a few months after Scotland’s latest Index of Multiple Deprivation reported that those neighbourhoods and communities experiencing the worst health and economic inequalities are the same ones who were dealing with them a generation ago.

Also yesterday, The Trussell Trust, which administers the UK’s network of food banks, revealed that it has distributed more than half a million food parcels in the past six months. If you haven’t visited a food bank you’ll find that there’s one near you. Distributing free food to needy people is one of Scotland’s biggest growth sectors.

If the Tories ever gained power at Holyrood one of the first things they’d no doubt do is privatise them.

Changes to the UK benefits system have led to people with no other means of obtaining food for their families increasingly having to fall on the mercy of food banks. The changes of the rules on benefits are so arbitrary that it’s clear they are drawn up by people who are accustomed to viewing their fellow human beings as mere numbers who are of no use to society: best that we waste as few resources on them as we can get away with. Only a Tory could have dreamt them up.

The Right in this country revile food banks because they are a rebuke to the values that propel their view of the world and their fellow human beings. “Brexit” and “quantitative easing” and “financial leveraging” are all recent additions to the argot of a rich country. The term “food bank” has become as familiar as each of them.

The widespread growth of food banks in Scotland (there are now more than 60) would shame a poor country. That they are reinforced annually by the shocking figures on child poverty is no longer shameful; it is disgusting and cries out for vengeance.

Last month, an analysis of inequality in the UK by Oxfam found that the accumulated wealth of Britain’s richest one per cent is more than 20 times the total of the poorest fifth. The charity stated that these numbers make this one of the most unequal in the developed world. Underpinning the figures is a matrix of wealth and entitlement consisting of property, pensions and shares.

These all contribute to the fortunes of around 634,000 individuals who are the richest people in the UK. This group of people, representing around one per cent of the UK’s population, are worth 20 times the combined wealth of the UK’s poorest 13m. Oxfam said that it felt that such a huge inequality gap was probably a significant factor in the vote to leave the European Union.

These numbers, north and south of the Border, and the tide of human misery that flows beneath them, now confront us with increasing regularity. Smart people say they lead to compassion fatigue but no one asks if there will ever be wealth fatigue. Instead, we obsess about Brexit and Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and our constitutional future.

In the past seven decades or so we’ve had a world war, 17 UK governments, membership of the EU and membership of Nato. In Scotland we’ve had all this plus five devolved parliaments administered exclusively by left-wing governments, all of whom have pledged to make this the most enlightened country in the world. We are technologically advanced and, annually, we produce and waste enough food to feed nations. Yet, in our biggest city, one out of every three children will go without food or proper shelter tonight.

This is what civilised government and reasonable discourse get you: nowhere fast. Such manifest greed, corruption and unfairness in a land of plenty cannot continue indefinitely. One day soon an eruption will occur and a price will have to be paid.