I NOTE the response from Duncan Macintyre (Letter, January 17) to my letter on poverty (January 16).

Poverty is relative, and one doesn’t need to be living in a hole in the ground eating neeps to be considered poor. I wonder just how many of those in full-time employment, often with multiple jobs, yet having to be given income support to survive financially feel that is an accurate description of them. Or those who have to attend food banks to keep their children fed; are they all slackers and junkies? What about those on zero-hour contracts because that’s all they can get, who are lifted and laid at their employers whim and don’t know from week to week what they will earn? What about the poor souls unfortunate enough to have been born in the shallow end of the gene pool, are they to be predestined to a life of penury?

At the other end of the scale there are people, some I know personally, where inherited wealth means nobody has needed to have what the rest of us would consider “a job” for generations and they live the life of Larry yet nobody calls them workshy layabouts. We live in a system with built-in bias, one where Carillion can collapse owing billions and nobody goes to jail, where workers' occupational pension funds can disappear and banks can be rescued at the tax-payers’ expense yet again nobody goes to jail; where oil companies can be given tax relief to exploit the North Sea oil resources we were told did not exist, one where tax evasion and tax avoidance is endemic and tacitly accepted as a fact of life yet benefit-fraud is pursued aggressively. The examples of bias are endless and in all the cases it’s you and me who foot the bill and it’s all money that could be used to help those most in need.

The system is rotten and deliberately so. Until members of the public stop accepting that “the poor are always with us” just thank your lucky stars you aren’t one of them as nobody further up the social scale gives a damn about them.

David J Crawford,

85 Whittingehame Court,

1300 Great Western Road, Glasgow.