IF ONLY Labour had eyes to see and the wisdom of old they might have noticed that a golden manifesto came gift-wrapped to them this week. They could have built their entire electoral strategy around this one and marched with it through the gates of hell. Within the space of three days three separate stories emerged that came together to illustrate the real challenges facing Scotland. Together they ought to have provided the impetus for Scottish Labour’s electoral strategy.

On Tuesday, the Trussell Trust released its latest figures indicating the numbers of Scots using food banks. The annual release of these numbers over the last few years has not diminished their impact. Around 1.2 million emergency supplies were given to people having recourse to a food bank last year; almost 450,000 of them to children. A single supply covers three days and is given to a person who is “in crisis”. It’s not difficult to know when an individual is deemed to have reached crisis point in his or her life and it will be the same for each of us. It’s when the prospect dawns on a person that he is likely to go without food for the foreseeable future.

Even then, depending on how high a price he might place on his dignity, he may be willing to tough it out for a few days. Such an option, though, becomes redundant when there are children involved. What parent wouldn’t cast their dignity to the winds if it stood between a hungry child and a decent meal? In this we see, perhaps, some method in the Tories’ madness with their enthusiasm for capping universal credit claims to two children. “You see; if poor parents stop having children then it will relieve pressure on foodbanks.” Expect Tory Glasgow MSP Annie Wells to deploy this one on the next occasion she is asked to defend her party’s imaginative approach to curbing child poverty. This is presuming the party managers have not been discouraged at Ms Wells’ previous car crash attempts to speak into a microphone and engage her brain at the same time; something she palpably failed to do last month when she questioned the legitimacy of the chamber which pays her a salary of £58,000 per annum.

Her colleague, the redoubtable Adam Tomkins, who is also Professor of Public Law at the University of Glasgow, attempted to mitigate the raw impact of such a high number of food bank users when he claimed 80 per cent of them used food banks on only one occasion. This represents significant progress in traditional Tory thinking about social issues. When faced with a facility that consistently shows year-on-year growth a Tory’s first instinct is usually to privatise it and then sell it off to foreign investors.

Yet another favoured Tory attempt to play down the troubling questions for an affluent society arising from high numbers of food bank users is to aver that many of us will always be drawn to an amenity that gives stuff away for free. The Tories, after all, have an unerring knack for sniffing out opportunities for obtaining something for nothing. The Panama Papers listing the names of rich people seeking to hide their taxable assets is full of them. And earlier this month the Prime Minister bequeathed a £1billion windfall to affluent residents in safe English Tory seats by cutting inheritance tax on properties worth up to £650,000.

Later in the week Oxfam Scotland released a report produced by the Fraser of Allander Institute designed to set the agenda for the Scottish Government’s imminent Poverty and Inequality Commission. This government cannot be faulted for helping Scotland’s burgeoning hotel and hospitality sector in the number of commissions, conventions and conferences it arranges every year. Oxfam Scotland, though, are formidable and seasoned campaigners and it’s to be hoped they hold the SNP’s feet to the fire on this one, to borrow one of the party’s pet turns of phrase.

The report stated that income inequality across the UK has continued to grow and that in Scotland it has reached historically high levels. The distribution of household wealth in Scotland shows the wealthiest ten per cent of our population own 9.4 times more household wealth than the whole of the bottom 40 per cent.

The Oxfam Report also found 75 per cent of respondents favour wealth being distributed more equally in Scotland; 64 per cent said politicians in Scotland should do more to address economic inequality and 58 per cent said they would support an independent body set up by government to propose policy solutions to tackle inequality in Scotland.

Oxfam Scotland’s head, Jamie Livingstone, said: “With nearly one in five people still living in poverty in Scotland, it cannot be right for the richest one per cent to own more wealth than the poorest 50 per cent put together and for income to be so unevenly shared too.” His organisation’s research shows a significant majority of Scots agree with him on every level. Nor can these figures be entirely laid at Theresa May’s door, as heartless and unfair as her government’s policies are. Holyrood possesses enough areas of devolved responsibility to reduce wealth inequality in Scotland, including education, housing and economic development. There may be a limit to how much you can achieve without possessing all levers of taxation and social security but what they have is sufficient to begin to make a difference.

The food bank numbers and Oxfam’s picture of how deeply unequal Scottish society is have occurred in a land which has delivered an unbroken succession of reportedly left-of-centre governments since devolution.

The Scottish Affairs Committee this week also produced its response to the decision by the DWP to close half of Glasgow’s Job Centres; another money-saving exercise which paid no heed to massive changes in the city’s transport infrastructure. Thus communities already targeted by tax credit cuts and the profiteering at the heart of the DWP’s stringent benefit interviews will now find it has just made the task of securing decent, paid employment a lot harder.

The best Job Centres are staffed by well-trained and experienced professionals who want to assist their clients in the business of getting back up on your horse and getting out there. Such expertise and care can never be replicated by a laptop. This is presuming you can afford a laptop what with all those children you irresponsibly insisted on having against the advice of Ruth Davidson.

Job Centre closures; more than one million food bank parcels; rampaging wealth inequality all on top of all the other insidious little inequalities which represent the reality of life under this government. The Labour Party in Scotland could have filled all their little brown suede boots with it and got back to doing what they were once good at: Hounding Tories for their persistent graft and dishonesty. Instead they have chosen once more to obsess about a referendum on Scottish independence.

Yes, Ms Davidson and Ms Dugdale; Scotland remains a deeply divided nation and it’s not between Yes and No factions: it’s between the very few who have and the great many who have not.