TRANSPORT Secretary Michael Matheson has revealed how childhood suffering shaped his political career in a new interview.
Speaking to current affairs magazine Holyrood, Matheson, who was raised in the Toryglen area of Glasgow, told of how three generations of his family shared a damp two-bedroom flat riddled with black mould for 12 years.
And, despite repeated appeals to councillors for help, he says conditions in the Prospecthill Circus property contributed to the pneumonia death of his grandfather.
The situation was so bad that the family went on a two-and-a-half-year rent strike to force the council into finding them alternative accommodation.
He said: “I remember us going up to see a new councillor and he promised he would take my mum and dad’s case to the special housing committee, that he would plead their case, and he was confident he’d be able to get us moved out of the flat because it was so damp.
“I can remember the sense of excitement that something was at last going to happen, and then going back up to the primary school to see this councillor with my mum and dad.
“My dad was so keen that he hadn’t even changed from his work clothes, he still had his dungarees on.
“We thought this was it, we’re going to get a new house, it was really exciting.
“I will always remember my mum coming out of that room crying because the councillor had lost our file, and nothing was going to happen.”
Matheson, who previously held the justice portfolio, said the family had been “let down” by local Labour councillors.
He told the magazine: “That whole experience shaped my early experience of politicians and of a system that let a decent family down on tackling something so fundamental as being in an overcrowded house that was also so badly damp.”
On the impact of deprivation, the Falkirk West MSP stated: “Modern-day politics, now more than ever, is looking for immediate solutions and immediate answers to very often complex, interdependent issues, that we can’t provide a quick and easy answer to.
“What we can do is set the course.
“Health inequalities [are] a consequence of social inequality.
“If you really want to make a difference here, don’t expect the health service to resolve it, tackle the social inequality.
“If you do that, then you’ll start to unpick the health inequalities that we have in society.
“Drugs are a health issue not a justice issue, it needs to be tackled with a public health strategy.
“The crux of all of this is social inequality.”
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