EVERY Friday morning I hold my weekly advice surgery. Each session begins more or less the same, I sit down with a caseworker from my office, we chat about the week and then wait for our first appointment to arrive.

Since becoming an MP, I have noticed an ever-increasing trend in these advice surgeries – for the most part it is women who arrive with questions or worries about the cost-of-living crisis and how this will affect their lives and families.

In far too many cases women take on the brunt of household work, managing budgets and the day-to-day running of the home. This unpaid labour so often goes unnoticed and undervalued.

What has been made clear by experts from Scottish charities like Engender and Scottish Women’s Budget group, is that the cost of living crisis is one that effects disproportionately women – women in work, women in receipt of social security payments, disabled women, women with no recourse to public funds, women reaching state pension age, women with children and women without children.

We know from Scottish Women Budget group research that it is women who are the “shock absorbers of poverty”. During a cost-of-living crisis, this problem is only exacerbated.

No matter the crisis, be it a pandemic or cost-of-living, women continue to pay the price of entrenched gender inequality. With a persisting gender pay and pensions gap, having lower savings and wealth than men, or the increased likelihood of being in more debt compared to male counterparts – women are faced disproportionately with financial hardship.

If you have kept up with the current news cycle, you will know that the Tories’ two-child cap policy has recently received the seal of approval from the pro-Brexit Labour Party – proving to be yet another U-turn for Sir Keir Starmer.

This archaic policy cements poverty in communities across Scotland, and deeply affects many women who manage their family’s budget. At a time when households should be able to access maximum financial support, both the Tories and Labour seem intent on depriving households of social security that they desperately need.

The gender pensions gap is an often unspoken relative of the gender pay gap but can be just as abrasive. The Scottish Widows found that when retiring on average men have £100,000 more in their pensions than women. If we want to eradicate pensioner poverty, this would be a good place to start. For women of state pension age who are faced with a gender pension gap, the cost of living crisis is felt all the more acutely, but the British Government’s solution? Asking women to consider returning to work to help make ends meet.

This is yet another hit at female pensioners, some of whom will also be fighting a battle against this government as part of the WASPI campaign.

The Scottish Child Payment, Baby Box and the expansion of funded early learning and childcare hours are just some of the measures the Scottish Government have put in place to address poverty in our communities. However, with 85% of social security spending reserved to Westminster, the Scottish Government can only go so far to reduce the impact of the cost-of-living crisis on women. In cases like this, the Scottish Government is fighting an uphill battle having to mitigate against the British Government’s austerity agenda.

This is an agenda that has seen the scrapping of the £20 Universal Credit uplift, the implementation two-child cap and associated rape clause, as well as the cruel sanctions and conditionality regime.

Thirteen years of Tory austerity policy has only further entrenched women’s inequality, and it will continue to do so until radical solutions are produced to address the cycle of poverty induced by the British Government. But Westminster does not offer these solutions and instead only builds barriers to eradicating poverty and gender equality.

At a time when women are faced with huge inequality of income and wealth, we need the Scottish Government to be equipped with the full levers of power to tackle these disparities, and we can only gain this one way: through Independence.

For as long as Scotland remains shackled to Westminster, and the cost of living crisis continues to run rampant across our communities, I will sit at my local surgeries and listen to the same worries and anxieties I hear every week.

My caseworker will continue to make notes and diligently send off the necessary letters to the DWP or the appropriate government department. I will leave with the same sinking feeling that there is only so much that I and my team can do whilst Westminster continually holds us back. But despite all of this, I will continue to work hard for my constituents and fight towards a fairer and more equal future where Scotland is independent.