When sorrows come, according to William Shakespeare, they arrive not as “single spies but in battalions.”

Old king Claudius in Hamlet wasn’t talking about the many ways poverty can sabotage the lives and life chances of young Scots but he could have been.

Of course, poverty is about just one thing, or the lack of it, but whole armies of related sorrows invade the space where money should be and, as Christmas approaches, march double time.

Child poverty has become a catch-all term for policy-makers, two little words that mean so much but, through overuse, risk becoming empty shorthand for a crisis so huge and intractable that it is impossible to know where to start.

Well, the scale of the crisis is certainly huge but it is absolutely tractable and we know exactly where to start.........

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