AMONG the most insidious concepts that the UK Right is fond of propagating, a few feature more than others. Often they are tailored and updated specifically for a targeted audience at a particular time in history. I listened to one of them just the other week while discussing why, in one of the most affluent economies in the world, entire communities across the UK still struggle with the effects of multi-deprivation and grinding poverty.

Yet, the notion was advanced that, compared with the conditions in which many people lived in these neighbourhoods just a generation ago, the poor are now living in a Nirvana. Fewer people in the world are dying of the diseases that killed many of their antecedents and standards of living among the poor are significantly higher.

There is better sanitation and healthcare provision and a more sophisticated network of social services than was ever previously available in this country. Poverty is relative, I was told and even our poorest are relatively better off than they have ever previously been. It’s like saying that after the American government grabbed their land, Native Americans were far better off because they were living in modern settlements instead of in wigwams amongst wild animals.

That hundreds of thousands of Scots are today living in poverty despite the introduction of better healthcare, sanitation and housing makes their deprivation more difficult to bear than it might have been in previous generations. The struggle that many of our fellow citizens encounter to provide food, shelter, heat and light until the end of the week must be more painful when it is evident that a tiny few in this country possess more than your entire community could spend in your collected lifetimes. Previous generations were only dimly aware that others lived lifestyles far removed from their own; today they not only know it but have their faces rubbed in it daily through mass communication and instant social media.

Also, in a previous age many of those who lived surrounded by material riches and privilege were prevented by their parents from ever knowing the extent of the poverty which lay just beyond their gilded existences. Now, they have no excuse. When Mike Ashley was building his sports goods empire and when Philip Green was taking massive dividends from BHS, each of them would have known the effects of low wages, unemployment and an absence of job security on communities.

Fewer than 120 years ago the UK Labour Party was founded to protect the victims of capitalists in the mould of Ashley and Green. It was intended to ensure that working people whose labours provided rich men with their fortunes got enough back in return to permit them to derive a degree of peace and contentment from their allotted time on this earth.

This was long overdue. For hundreds of years previously the UK Tory Party had viewed the overwhelming majority of their fellow human beings as existing merely to dance to their whims and fight in the wars that they waged for the sole purpose of finding new markets to slake their thirst for more riches. The attitude of Green, Ashley and many thousands of modern-day capitalists who expect the Conservative and Unionist Party to protect their avarice has changed little from Victorian times. It’s why I simply cannot understand why reasonable and otherwise decent people such as Ruth Davidson, Adam Tomkins and Brian Whittle would choose ever to join such a political organisation let alone strive to advance its agenda. What advances there have been in this country to restore a little balance and to introduce a semblance of fairness have been due, exclusively, to the efforts of the UK Labour Party. Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson, Alistair Darling and their ilk were handed a God-given, three-term and historic opportunity to embed equality and fairness in this country’s social infrastructure.

They chose to squander it, though, by pandering to the interests of big business, the banks, the military and a media largely owned by those who had a stake in greed, unearned wealth and power without responsibility. As we saw once more earlier this week, these interests need the UK royal family to convey the fiction that we are all really in it together.

Look no further than this for the reasons why so many supporters of the Labour Party in Scotland migrated into the arms of the SNP. Many of them didn’t do so because they nurtured a dream that was an independent Scotland, rather they nurtured a dream that an independent Scotland could help bring about fairness.

The SNP might well deliver on some of their promises to build a fairer society in Scotland and I sincerely hope that they do, but they won’t achieve this by appointing an education tsar, hosting yet another education talking shop and meeting their own climate change targets ahead of schedule.

Nor will the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party chivvy the SNP Government to act more radically in their stated aim of making Scotland fairer. Only a strong and authentically socialist Labour Party can pressurise the SNP into delivering on its pre-election pledges.

This is why Kezia Dugdale was right to ask the Labour Party to consider establishing an independent Labour Party in Scotland. Hopefully, she will choose to ignore the advice she was offered this week by Gemma Doyle, who lost West Dunbartonshire for Labour at last year’s General Election. Doyle appears to have placed more value on preserving the UK than in returning her party to its core values. Thus, she deserved to lose her seat.

Unfortunately though, Dugdale’s idea of what a Scottish ILP ought to look like is different from mine. I would suggest the root-and-branch filleting of the current shambles of a party and the founding of a new Scottish ILP to replace it. Every office would be up for grabs and the new party would require to raise its own finance.

In the three weeks since Labour returned to Holyrood as the third biggest party, their conduct on named persons and fracking has been shameful. In their current form, they are finished. If they are to have a future, they must ditch Westminster and return to the past.