THE name Michelle McGagh may not ring many bells in Scotland, but this month the financial journalist became the toast of the London-based broadsheets.

“My Buy Nothing Year: How One Woman Saved £22,000” proclaimed the headline in The Telegraph. “My Year of Buying Nothing,” said The Guardian, while Cosmopolitan reported her story under the title, “I Bought Nothing for a Year.”

Seems like a pretty amazing, if not impossible, feat – until you read on and discover that she actually did buy food and toiletries, while continuing to pay her mortgage, gas, electricity, mobile phone and broadband.

But sadly “there was no budget for luxuries —no cinema trips, no nights in the pub, no takeaways or restaurant meals, no new clothes, no holidays, no gym memberships”.

So, Michelle – welcome to the world of the millions of other people across the UK who don’t have a budget for these things either. Except that they don’t place themselves in that position voluntarily and they don’t stick to a 12-month deadline. And they wouldn’t have £22,000 at the end of the year to pay off a chunk of a mortgage – like Michelle did.

No, they’re more likely to be pilloried as wasters and scroungers than fawned over by glossy magazines as the new hero of the middle classes.

So let’s talk about real poverty. Not the kind that has publishers offering lucrative book deals for the inside story, but the kind that destroys lives.

Poverty traps generation after generation of families in a vicious cycle of physical and mental health problems. I have known poverty first-hand – thankfully it has not stalked my whole life. But many people I grew up with drifted into drugs, alcohol and tobacco at an early age and grew old before their time.

If the future stretches before you like a cold, grey, eternal mist, then of course you’ll be tempted to console yourself with junk food, booze and cigarettes. And that just makes things worse, because it eats into your already meagre income. You know you’re killing yourself slowly, but who cares?

This week, a damning report from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health concluded that “children living in the most deprived areas are much more likely to be in poor health, be overweight or obese, suffer from asthma, have poorly managed diabetes, experience mental health problems, and die early.”

“Scotland’s child health among worst in Europe” proclaimed the front of the Scottish edition of The Telegraph – a headline echoed almost exactly by the BBC Scotland website and the Daily Record.

Scottish journalists have always looked for a Scottish angle in a UK story – what they call "putting a kilt on it". That’s understandable, because you want to make your story relevant to your readership. But such headlines can also be misleading. In this case, they prompted a flurry of criticism of the Scottish Government.

Labour’s Monica Lennon claimed that the report “highlights the failings of the SNP’s decade in power”; Miles Briggs, of the Scottish Conservatives, said it was “proof that the SNP was doing little to tackle key health issues across Scotland”.

It was nothing of the sort. The report was not about the failings of health policy in Scotland. Its essence was summed up in the news headline of the main UK-wide BBC website: “UK has stark inequalities in child health”.

I’m well aware that the Scottish Government could be more radical with the powers it has. But those who blame the Scottish Government for child health inequalities are missing the central point of the report, which is that this shocking child health crisis is rooted in poverty.

Tellingly, the State of Child Health report noted that there have been huge improvements in child health in the UK over the past 100 years – but since the mid-1990s, “there has been a slowing of progress”. Politicians whose parties have held power in Westminster during these past 20 years really need to think twice and three times before casting the first stone.

Throughout this slowdown of progress Westminster has had full control over taxation, social security and the level of the national minimum wage.

But the blame game won’t change a single child’s life. We all need to stop hoping poverty will just go away of its own accord, because it won’t. While it persists, it stains our society and drags us all down.

We have agencies galore – the "poverty industry", as it’s sometimes called – dealing with the symptoms. They advise people on the breadline how to juggle their debts, where to buy cheap healthy food, how to stop smoking. But isn’t it time we started to administer the cure?

So let’s start with two simple truths. First, the cause of poverty is lack of money. And second, the solution to poverty is to give poor people more money. The highly-respected Child Poverty Action Group is one of those agencies that is prepared to get to the heart of the matter. It warns that things are going to get even worse, with a 50 per cent increase in child poverty in Scotland by 2020 because of UK tax and benefit policies.

And it puts forward not a solution, but a practical first step that would make a huge difference to those at the bottom of the heap. By using its new powers, Holyrood could top up child benefit by £5 a week – and instantly lift 30,000 children out of poverty.

It would represent an average increase in tax of £2 a week if the cost was spread across all Scottish taxpayers. We could be even more radical and increase the 40 per cent tax rate to 42.5 per cent – and pay for the whole lot from that group alone. I would hope that wealthier Scots would be happy to pay to remove the blight of poverty from so many children’s lives.

We say we want self-determination because we want a better, fairer Scotland. So let’s all put our money where our mouth is, show the poorest families that we mean business and send the message loud and clear that independence will begin to transform Scotland.