I thank my friend Paul O’Kane for lodging the motion. The study by the University of Glasgow and Marie Curie, supported by the Economic and Social Research Council and led by Dr Naomi Richards, is all the more important because we know that life expectancy in Scotland is not going up—it is coming down. We know that, by 2040, up to 10,000 more people than now will be dying, with end-of-life support needs, in Scotland; that poverty and inequality are rising and fuelling premature mortality; and that people are dying before their time.

The fact that much of that is hidden, socially invisible, out of sight and silent is not acceptable; it should not be politically invisible, out of sight or silent. What that important research does is describe the shame of poverty—not the shame of those who are living in poverty but our shame that we allow it to exist at all.

The story told in the dying in the margins report is both harrowing and uplifting. Margaret Mitchell’s images are beautiful. The people in them are beautiful. They bear witness to the real lives of real people in the world as it really is. They are stories, often in the past tense, because most of those beautiful souls are dead, but they are not historical. They are a portrait of what is happening now. It is a mirror up close to the grinding poverty in Scotland today, which strips too many people of human dignity and basic human rights at their time of life, and at their time of death.

That serves as a reminder that being poor is not a simple lack of income and wealth, and that alone; it is also a lack of power. I say to the Minister and to members of this Parliament that it is not good enough for us to simply denounce that. The question for those of us with power is: what are we going to do about it?

Are we going to implement the report’s key recommendations on housing, on health and on support for front-line workers? What are we going to do to build a compassionate, decent, humane, democratic and equal society? There is a vicious cycle at work here: if you live in poverty, you are more likely to get sick and to live in poor and overcrowded housing, which has a direct link to poor health, both physical and mental.

We do not just want the amelioration of poverty palliatives; we demand fundamental change. We live in an age of extremes: extreme wealth and privilege on the one hand and indescribable poverty, misery and despair on the other. It is a self-evident truth that we live in a class-based society, that there is a class system, that the rich are so rich only because the poor are so poor, and that there is a huge concentration of power in the hands of a few.

We need to change that at its very root—to change the balance of power in order to win equality not just of opportunity but of outcomes, so that people do not just live and survive but prosper and flourish. That is about the standard of living, but it is also about the standard of dying. It is about social cohesion and solidarity and about the equal worth of all. Above all else, it is about challenging and changing all the assumptions of the existing social order and replacing them with an ethical, a better and, I would argue, a more socialist alternative.