Yesterday the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, who claim to be an anti-poverty think tank, held their annual lecture.  Coming at a time of soaring homelessness, brutal benefit sanctions and more cuts on the way you might have expected this event to discuss how to best resist, or at least mitigate the impact of what is to come.

You might have expected that.  What happened instead was a speech by the leader of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party Ruth Davidson during which she set her stall out as a Tory who pretends to care about the poor in advance of the Scottish parliament elections in May.  She was warmly received by the small gathering of poverty professionals who bothered to turn out for the lecture.  She should have been fucking lynched.

Davidson began her speech with a frank description of how most in the Conservative Party view the poor – in…