As I write, the school holidays are almost over.

Youngsters will be looking forward with varying degrees of enthusiasm or trepidation to their next year at school, parents looking at the same - possibly with relief, teachers with plans for the new term already in place. It’s the same every year, and hopefully everyone will be able to look back on the summer with at least some good memories.

It’s been hot but also very rainy - is this the new norm with climate change or was it always a bit like this and our adult brains have just blotted it out?

One thing that is different nowadays is the phrase that has already entered the lexicon of common usage - “holiday hunger”.

How did we get into this position, where one of the supposedly richest countries in the world has to concern itself with how school children are being fed, indeed if they are being fed, over the summer weeks?

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Through the Thatcher years, through recessions and booms, this was never really an issue, but come the financial crash and the failure of the banks, it is ordinary people who end up suffering. There is no value in austerity that punishes the innocent. There is no value in a welfare system that is designed to punish those least able to look after themselves. There is no value in only looking at the long term when the short term pain lasts year after year.

Unfortunately this will be a memory for far too many young people as they walk through the school gates.

In Glasgow we may rightly feel proud of the work of so many local organisations that have come together with the council to address this issue over the last couple of years. But the real issue is why it has arisen in the first place, and why we have to put up with such a system in this 21st century.

Recessions and booms may come and go - but let no one tell you that austerity is not a choice, because it was and it is.