WHEN a young relative asks you for some assistance with his Modern Studies assignment about health inequality in the UK and in Scotland, you find yourself approaching the subject carefully. You don’t want to fill his 15-year-old head simply with a left-wing interpretation of this issue; its causes and its effects. His young mind is still making sense of what is unfolding in the world around him and you feel that he is bright enough to come to his own conclusion about the state of things without trying to bend his thoughts unduly towards a purely radical analysis of just what the hell is going on. And, in any case, to seek to distort the narrative may lead to the unintended consequence of a young mind deciding to take the opposite view just to be perverse and rebellious. After all, it’s what you would have done at his age.

And so you talk about the banking crisis of 2008 and the now universal acceptance that this was caused by a tiny group of people whom governments of the left and right had given a licence to amass fortunes on a grotesque scale with seemingly little accountability. And you try to convey to him that, though a body called the Financial Services Authority was supposed to scrutinise the methods by which these fortunes were amassed and to ensure that all transactions conformed to high standards of probity, that it failed in this, its primary function.

And you describe, as best you can, how the UK was left with a mountain of debt as it spent billions to rescue the guilty parties. We were told, you tell him by way of explanation, that if they were allowed to die then the supply of money would dry up and that the streets would resemble scenes from Zombie Apocalypse.

And that, although the banks were told to stimulate growth by using our money to grant well-run businesses small loans and overdrafts at reasonable rates of return, they instead destroyed thousands of small firms by insisting they re-paid loans immediately or hitting them with massive penalties. This slowed the economic recovery and led to many people losing their jobs and their savings. While all this was happening, the financial institutions were still awarding their own executives multimillion-pound bonuses.

At this point you pause for a few minutes to wonder if you have begun to stray from your initial promise not to hammer the lad with left-wing propaganda. But no, you go through some of the old cuts and find that this also was how it was reported in both the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph. You decide, magnanimously, to describe each of these organs as having a relaxed approach to amassing great personal wealth and in an environment free of regulations or penalties. You even say that somewhere between their approach and your own lies the truth of the matter.

You tell him that the Conservatives inevitably came to power following the abject failure of Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling to control the behaviour of the banks (you don’t mention that they were Scots). And that this was like inviting Al Capone to run the tombola stall at the church fayre. Consequently, it was only a matter of time before they began to behave according to their nature to reduce the deficit wrought by their supporters and party donors in the financial sectors. And that, once a second election was won, they felt it would be safe to save a large chunk of the deficit by reducing unemployment and disability benefits for the country’s most vulnerable people. Moreover, you tell him, they decided also to penalise them if they had the cheek to live in a house with a spare bedroom, even if that spare room was kept for the return of a soldier son from a war in which he’d risked his life fighting for the country which passed this law.

ONCE more you pause to inspect what you have just told him and whether a more charitable interpretation could be offered, and once more you find that the same has been widely reported across a broad spectrum of opinion. You recommend that he visit the websites of respected independent organisations such as the Trussell Trust, Oxfam and the Howard League for Penal Reform.

In these places he would discover that the UK is one of the five richest nations in Europe but that, nonetheless, in Scotland in 2015 there were more than 50 food banks operating. 250,000 children lived in poverty and out of those 5,000 did not have a home to go to. Not only did they not know where their next meal was coming, but did not even know who was providing it.

He would also discover that our jails were full of people who had been caught trying to defraud the state by falsely claiming for benefits or for defaulting on fines for minor offences. And he would learn that none of these people would ever find themselves sharing a cell with any of those whose greed and corruption rendered their own misdemeanours as paltry as passing off a cent for a penny.

You then find yourself encouraging the lad to read newspapers or at least consult their online versions, starting from this very Sunday, and you recommend a broad spectrum of left, right and centre. You purchase subscriptions to them as an early birthday present.

And so, today he discovered that David Cameron now wants to extend benefit sanctions to those who have low-paid or part-time jobs and that he is also seeking to send one of his children to a school that costs £18,000 in annual school fees. He also discovered that six out of the ten richest companies operating in the UK will pay little or no tax on their earnings.

For further reading, you recommend he read a few chapters of Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens and ask him to compare and contrast urban life in 21st-century Britain with the same 150 years ago.

In your head you are beginning to prepare next week’s lesson: Scottish Independence; Yes or No?