WEDNESDAY was a dark day for anti-poverty and children’s right campaigners.

It began with the implementation of a cut to Universal Credit, worth more than £1000 per year to hundreds of thousands of families across the UK. Even at the last minute, many hoped that Boris Johnson and his colleagues would have a rare moment of self-reflection, think again and stop this callous, cruel and totally unnecessary cut.

There is no doubt about the impact it will have. They were warned time and again that it will only serve to plunge more families into desperation. They knew about the brutal consequences, but chose to carry on regardless.

The Joseph Rowntree Trust has warned that 500,000 people will be swept into poverty, including 200,000 children. This will not just have an impact on their present, but also on their future. People who grow up in poverty are far more likely to suffer from poor physical and mental health and to find themselves in low paid jobs in the future.

The timing could not be worse. It has been a particularly difficult 18 months and far too many people are living hand-to-mouth and enduring huge levels of anxiety. There are some positive signs in terms of our Covid rates, but it is a fragile time for so many households.

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Perhaps £20 a week is not a lot of money to Boris Johnson or Rishi Sunak. But, for millions of people it could be the difference between heating their home or not, getting new clothing for their children or not, having to go to the food bank or not, eating three meals a day or not.

Every day I am contacted by people who are being hit with a perfect storm of escalating fuel prices, the end of furlough payments and a National Insurance hike that disproportionately impacts people on low incomes.

These are the people I was thinking of on Wednesday afternoon, when I joined my Green colleagues in marking Poverty Awareness Week. The symbolism of us doing so at a time when Downing Street was imposing the biggest welfare cut for a generation wasn’t lost on any of us.

Unfortunately the day would soon get even worse. Shortly before noon it was announced that the Supreme Court had upheld Downing Street’s attempt to stop the Scottish Government from incorporating the United Nations Convention on the Rights of a Child into Scots law.

The Scottish Government’s commitment had actually been a moment of positive unity in Holyrood. Every MSP voted to support it. Even the Tory MSPs backed it. Unfortunately, none of this has stopped the constitutional game-playing, with the Scottish Tories now condemning the same Bill that they themselves had backed.

But, at heart, this isn’t a question of party politics. It is a question of power. The fact that the UK Government is prepared to use the courts to overturn a decision by the Scottish Parliament to protect the rights of children reveals their flagrant disregard for devolution.

What the judgement makes clear is that the powers we have are even more limited than we had previously thought.

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What kind of message does it send when our parliament does not even have the power to adequately enshrine the rights of children?

When considered alongside the proposed boundary changes and new regulations on voter ID, it is clear that the Tories are trying to rewrite democracy to ensure that they have a permanently in-built majority across the UK.

There are big steps that we are taking in Scotland to alleviate the misery. As part of the co-operation agreement with the Scottish Government we are doubling the Scottish child payment and providing relief payments to families on low income. We are building 110,000 affordable homes and introducing new and better rights for tenants, including rent controls. These are vital changes that will have a big impact. But there is so much more that we want to do.

We want to right the wrongs that have been inflicted from Westminster. We want to scrap trident and invest that money in our communities, and we want to stop the drilling in Cambo and build the renewables revolution that is needed to tackle Scotland’s role in the climate crisis. But the powers we need to do these things are not in Holyrood, they are in Westminster.

What is becoming clearer than ever is that Scotland needs a way out.

In the areas where Holyrood has been able to take action we have set positive precedents and introduced progressive and preventative changes that put people first. In the last parliament Green MSPs played a central role in introducing free school meals for all primary school pupils, progressive taxation to fund public services and free bus travel for everyone under 22. None of this would have been introduced by Westminster.

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That is why we must do even more to chart a different path as a modern and democratic nation that provides support for people while respecting human rights and looking after our children.

Independence isn’t just a question of democracy. It is a choice between two futures. We can either have more years of fighting Tory fires and working within constraints set by a Westminster government that can challenge us at every step, or we can build a fairer and greener future that invests in people and the planet.

I don’t want children to grow up in a Scotland where a Cabinet full of millionaires can inflict poverty on hundreds of thousands of people overnight. Nor do I want them to be in one where their rights can be undermined as part of a cynical constitutional parlour game. We can and must do things differently.