I spent a chunk of last week talking to the folk behind the UK Right to Food Commission.

There are 14 million people going hungry in Britain today, and the commissioners were telling me about their upcoming fact-finding trip to Scotland.

They’re gathering evidence about hunger in the UK and compiling a report for the nation’s four governments in London, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast.

The report will outline the experiences of people going without, and make a series of recommendations about how our political leaders should respond.

It’s an astonishing figure: 14 million people not getting enough to eat. In Scotland, the number is just over one million, and of that 210,000 are kids.

Health, hope and happiness have been shattered for millions by austerity. The facts are shaming for any nation, let alone one of the world’s richest.

Some of the details of what the commissioners uncovered shocked me - and I’ve reported extensively on what poverty is doing to our country for years.

I still can’t get out of my head the story about the doctor who thought a child had cancer because they were so badly malnourished, or the kid who had never seen a tomato, or one wee soul whose family had so little they had to take an onion to school in their lunchbox.

It brought back memories from my own childhood. Unpleasant memories. I grew up on a really rough housing estate in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

Read more by Neil Mackay

Neil’s long read with the Right to Food Commissioners

Scots parents are starving themselves to feed their kids

 Human Rights chief on poverty destroying Scotland

I remember one wee girl in my P3 class........

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