IT seems that our twin constitutional obsessions – Brexit and independence, the two debates which have riven Britain and Scotland now for years – may both have been mirages.

No Brexit is now more likely than no deal, says Theresa May – and a No Deal situation is not going to happen. Scottish independence is dead in the water for the foreseeable future. The chances of the SNP, now fighting like cats in a bag, leading a successful Yes campaign is frankly laughable.

For years now, our attention has been demanded by these two seemingly great debates. Brexit and independence have clod-hopped into every news cycle taking centre stage, but behind the curtain other events have been happening – matters which make the navel-gazing esoterica of constitutional politics seem petty and juvenile.

Let’s just focus on yesterday’s news cycle. It was Brexit and SNP smears and civil war from wall to wall. Yet a story cropped up which in any right-minded society should have dominated debate – for it shames our governments and our so-called politicians.

Nearly 200,000 households in Scotland struggle to pay their rent or mortgage every month – that’s 12 per cent of all families. More than one in 10 of us don’t know if we can keep a roof over our heads, heat our homes and feed our kids. Yet all we hear from the people we elect – our very highly-paid MPs, MSPs, and MEPs – is Brexit and independence ad nauseam. Toddlers have more extensive vocabularies.

Two years ago, only nine per cent of Scottish households struggled to pay their rent or mortgage. While our politicians squawked endlessly about the constitution, the number of people living in financial dread steadily increased. These figures come from Shelter Scotland via YouGov.

Read more: The 'disgraceful' rise in number of Scots struggling to pay their rent or mortgage

Dig a little deeper and the state of affairs becomes worse –36 per cent of people said they’d struggle to pay their rent or mortgage if it rose by only £50 a month. This isn’t just living from pay cheque to pay cheque, this is a few quid a day making the difference between having a home or not. On top of that, 39 per cent had to borrow money from friends or use a credit card to pay bills. The lucky ones spent their savings on debt.

Shelter helped more people last year than ever before – when nearly 11,000 households were forced to live in temporary accommodation, including more than 14,000 children. Graeme Brown, director of Shelter Scotland, says”it’s a disgrace that in 21st century Scotland so many people should have to worry about the basic right of keeping a roof over their heads” – and damn it, he’s right.

Inevitably, politicians on all sides of the constitutional debates see social problems through their own partisan lens. Brexiters say that in a post-EU Britain we’ll have the money and power to sort out our problems; Remainers say we need the EU to battle social ills; Yessers say Scotland can only solve these issues unshackled from Westminster; Unionists say we need to be all in it together.

I say: shut up to all of them. Stop diverting attention away from the problems screaming in your face; stop creating constitutional phantoms that don’t pay bills. Think about the people who elected you – families in council estates trying to raise their kids on minimum wage; stop thinking about what that the history books will say about you because, as with most politicians, they won’t be kind.

Arguing over the constitution, when 200,000 families go to sleep each night worrying if they’ll have a house the next morning, is like obsessing over which fancy china plates you should buy when there’s no food in the cupboard.

You don’t have to be a genius to work out how to help ordinary people – but I think it might help if you aren’t a politician.

Latest figures show that between 2014 and 2017, one million Scots were living in poverty. Self-evidently politicians came out every one of those years and mouthed platitudes about their “absolute commitment” to ending poverty. Utter nonsense. Just because you use the words “fair” and “equal” all the time, it doesn’t mean you care about them.

Dig a little deeper and the truth appears: families with disabled people are more likely to be poor. Some 90,000 children in poverty are in families where there is a disability. Researchers investigating poverty in Scotland found that as well as those thrust into poverty due to disability, either of themselves or a family member for whom they care, the other groups most at risk of poverty are single parents, who are mostly women; families in which one partner – usually the woman – is staying at home to raise children; and those in part-time work raising children, again mostly women.

Our most vulnerable – the disabled and children – are the victims of political failure. Being disabled, or having a disabled family member, will likely make you poor. Having children and raising them amid the gladiatorial combat of a job market designed by the Marquis de Sade on behalf of Gordon Gekko may also likely make you poor.

The UN’s special rapporteur on human rights has spoken of his dismay at the 14 million UK citizens living in poverty. Professor Philip Alston described a land of foodbanks, homelessness, and “the sense of despair that leads even the [UK] Government to appoint a minister for suicide prevention”. With some two million people struggling to eat regularly, and children going to school hungry, the UK Government is being urged to appoint another minister – a minister for hunger. This in the fifth-largest economy in the world.

Does it take a new John Maynard Keynes to work it out? Pay people and build things. Building means employment and homes. Pay carers who look after disabled relatives the living wage – because they are working just as much as you or I. Pay mothers – and fathers – who stay at home to raise their children, because they too are working just as hard and doing just as important work.

If governments acquiesce in any way to the idea that being disabled or raising your children makes you fair game for the scrapheap, then the big constitutional question isn’t Brexit or independence, it’s how to get rid of the whole damned lot of them and start again.