WHEN you want to understand about austerity and the effects of welfare cuts on Scotland’s most vulnerable people, particularly children, no-one knows better than stand-up comedian Tommy Harley.

For Harley, a support worker at Young Foundations Residential Home in Johnstone, it means pain and suffering at a level most people cannot begin to imagine. “Children always suffer the most,” he says.

Harley has known his fair share of tragedy through poverty, substance abuse and Scotland’s broken care system. Growing up in a family of five kids from Fife he was sent to a children’s home aged nine after assaulting his drunk and violent father.

Almost as soon as he arrived, he was subjected to a regime of sexual and physical abuse of the worst kind. “It just became a daily nightmare where all you could do was try and survive,” he says.

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Harley endured this horror for seven years before being released from the care home. Aged 16 he was given £200 and a donkey jacket and sent out into the world not being able to read or write.

Ten years of drug addiction followed. Completely broken spiritually and physically, Harley managed to find his way to residential rehabilitation unit Jericho House in Greenock where his mentor Anne Diamond helped him rebuild his life.

“It took enormous strength to get clean,” Harley says. “But I managed to do it and was also taught how to read and write. Jericho put me through college where I learned to become a care worker. It was the job I was born to do.”

Harley sees up close what happens when families descend deep into poverty. “The problem is getting worse,” he says.

“When people lose even a small amount of money through cuts or job loss then very often there’s substance abuse. The kids who come from poverty-stricken broken homes end up in places like Young Foundations.”

Harley says the care system is now nothing like the brutal regimes he suffered as a child but he can’t understand the level of inequality that exists in a state as rich as the UK.

‘YOU know, I read about what went on at Downing Street in the paper and think the money they wasted on booze at one of those parties could feed a poor family for a month,” he says. “I also think about how Boris Johnson once said that money spent on investigating historic child abuse was money wasted. Cash spaffed up against the wall, he said.

“I’d like to think if he were to come and meet the young people at the home, hear their stories about how they ended up in the home it might make some change in him. But I honestly think he’s incapable of any kind of empathy. He is the worst possible leader at a time when we need someone with a bit of basic decency.”

Despite what he sees in his day job, Harley is one of the funniest and most charismatic people you could meet. It’s easy to see why he’s such an inspiration to the kids at Young Foundations.

When he’s not working at the home, he has a successful career as a stand-up comedian. “When I was a kid one of the things that help me stay alive is that I could make people laugh,” he says.

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“You have to find a way to turn round the trauma of what you experienced and try to find the humour in it.”

Harley has a very strong Fife accent and says that this always goes down well with his Glasgow audience. A regular at Yes Bar in the city centre, he is doing more and more shows now that Covid restrictions have come to an end.

“Nicola Sturgeon is coming to a wee festival we’re doing in August. It would be great if I got to meet her,” Harley says.

“At the end of the day I’m doing what I love doing. Helping other folk as I was once helped and making people laugh. I just need to work out a new routine on Boris in time for Nicola coming to the show. That’s if he’s still the PM

in August!”