What do we, as a political community, really believe about poverty? There are simple answers to that question, but sometimes simplicity can be the enemy of accuracy. Take Scotland, where, on the surface, our national parliament has backed ambitious targets to virtually eliminate child poverty by 2030.

Every party in Holyrood – indeed, every MSP at the time – supports those objectives. Humza Yousaf recently went further, boldly stating that eliminating poverty will be his “defining mission”; and as is customary, NGOs across Scotland “welcomed” this worthy pronouncement.

But even the most incurably romantic optimists can’t claim that Scotland will get anywhere near meeting these lofty aims. The political debate has long ago shifted from policy to culpability: faced with drug deaths and attainment gaps, are you an #SNPBad person? Or are you laying this at the door of Tories in London? In those very questions is contained the silent, depressing admission that the poor will always be with us.

Scotland, at least, is officially opposed to poverty. Surely that’s progress? Yet strictly speaking, even that isn’t true. Our national ideology implies, in a more subtle way, that undeserved poverty is wrong: adult poverty can still be explained away as bad choices, weak character or laziness; but we can’t bring ourselves to lump those stereotypes onto blameless children.

READ MORE: Cat Boyd: I'm a socialist and believe in independence

We blame adults, and indeed hold them doubly culpable, for staining our national conscience with barefoot bairns. Hence, the average voter's impossible demand, demonstrated in opinion poll after opinion poll: to eliminate poverty for children while preserving it for adults.

There were howls of protest from many quarters when Keir Starmer committed to keeping the two-child benefit cap. Others, like John McTernan, praised Starmer’s honesty, relative to Holyrood phoneys who condemn poverty while doing nothing to fix it. The very fact he could argue this shows how easily the language of brutal candour can serve dishonest purposes. Financially, eliminating the cap is affordable; it’s unaffordable only in electoral terms.

Starmer’s approach is a product of decades of fossilised common sense which is impervious to evidence or sceptical doubt. That’s why he won’t suffer too much, beyond getting pilloried on Twitter, just as Margaret Thatcher never suffered for milk snatching.

As with Thatcher, Starmer is trading on the Britain’s complex national imagination of poverty. We are sentimental about it: everyone loves a ‘rags to riches’ yarn. We believe it builds character: Starmer is hardly alone in trading on his alleged hard luck origin story. Nor is he alone in exaggerating his hardships, and political audiences have become highly complicit in these hypocrisies. We believe – or claim to believe – stories of grinding childhood poverty from our own ideological side; we sneer at those from our opponents.

The Herald: Cat Boyd is joining The Herald as a columnistCat Boyd is joining The Herald as a columnist (Image: free)

And of course, when it comes to poverty, the nation remains as moralistic as ever: collectively, we can’t shake the belief that poverty must be about the individual. And that, rather than finances, is Starmer’s true dilemma: reconciling the nation’s paternalistic concern for the innocent victim with our punitive belief in personal responsibility.

It's only a minority of us – who are far louder on Twitter than in everyday life – who believe that poverty, as such, is an enemy of all human development. That it should be eliminated for everyone.

Here, I go further than most, because I don’t romanticise the poor. I’d eliminate poverty even for lazy, incompetent and foolish adults who have made a succession of bad choices. I don’t say this because I’m a good, altruistic or exceptionally charitable person. I simply believe that the sum of human freedom will increase if we can eliminate poverty for the ‘culpable’ as well as the blameless.

Nonetheless, believing that poverty should be eliminated regardless of personal virtue – as I do – is not the same as saying that the poor should have no personal responsibility. Sadly, for many leftists, denying the poor agency and moral choices has become the very point of politics.

And this doesn’t just apply to the poor. Increasingly, it defines the left’s whole ethic of victimhood on matters of race, gender, sexuality and disability. On the one hand, online leftists insist harder than ever on personal accountability for the sins of privilege.

READ MORE: Independence supporters must be honest about cost of radical change

We must make restitution for whiteness, atone for toxic masculinity, educate ourselves about heteronormativity and so on. On the other hand, insofar as one has a badge of victimhood, one is absolved of blame for anything: we fight harder than ever to tell people that they are victims of structural circumstances and that their personal choices are meaningless.

Some old-fashioned paternalists imagine society’s victims as too oppressed to make valid and meaningful decisions. This handwringing liberalism has a long lineage: the best ever critique was Oscar Wilde’s Soul of Man Under Socialism, written way back in 1891.

But there is also a socialist-sounding version of this fallacy. This claims that, if you can convince people that they have no meaningful personal choices (due to structural oppression), they will instead exert their agency at a collective level, by organising trade unions, community campaigns or socialist parties.

This is a travesty of human psychology. If oppressed and impoverished people cannot exert self-discipline and make difficult, meaningful choices then there’s little hope of self-organising at the community level.

None of which disguises structural factors in explaining inequality. But, to paraphrase Marx, the point is not just to understand adverse circumstances, but to change them. Changing the world is hard: it requires personal self-discipline in pursuit of collective aims. If we can’t expect this of oppressed people, then, yes, the poor will always be with us. Because, as much as we might like to believe differently, the good intentions of intellectuals and political commentators change nothing.

The blend of paternalism and psychobabble that we call “leftism” today is a travesty of what the left used to fight for. You won’t find any of this among, say, the Black Panthers, Malcolm X or on Red Clydeside. Leaving aside their relative merits, it’s unarguable that all of the above organised among people just as oppressed by circumstances – if not significantly more so – than the poor today. It’s equally unarguable that they emphasised personal self-discipline and self-transformation among society’s most fallen people, to an almost evangelical degree.

Today, when it comes to poverty, social decline and individual nihilism are drawn together in a complex downward spiral of hopelessness. Bemoaning Starmer’s indulgence of poverty hypocrisies is easy. But a certain type of leftist “be kind’ mentality has become complicit in the same status quo. If you deny poor, oppressed people the power to make choices, take responsibility and improve themselves as individual people, you’re also denying their capacity to organise, resist and transform their circumstances.