NEAR the end of the Transcending Poverties conference in Glasgow on Tuesday, a woman in the audience called out to be allowed her say. She came from Easterhouse. All day, beneath the ornate chandeliers in the grand banqueting hall of Glasgow City Chambers, she had listened to 16 distinguished speakers from academia, the civic city and the churches dissect questions such as: will the poor always be with us? You've been talking about people like me and my neighbours, she pointed out. I know you are well-meaning, but this isn't just about having no job or less money to spend; it's about a kind of "social and economic apartheid" in this city.

In a few sentences her passion cut through all the powerpoint presentations and subtle ambiguities of the title dreamed up by the day's organisers, the Royal Society of Edinburgh. This was about people who feel physically and spiritually shut off from life in the city mainstream, hidden away from the Glasgow of new jobs, designer shopping, waterfront apartments, festivals, boutique hotels and cafe culture. And, to be brutally honest, six hours of learned discourse and debate produced very few fresh prescriptions for how to bring that resilient system of apartheid to an early end.

There were those, on the platform and in the audience, who wanted to scale the barricades. Only the overthrow of neo-liberal capitalism, an end to globalisation, punitive taxation of the better off and/or the scrapping of Trident would create the conditions for poverty to be vanquished. Others advocated micro-measures, such as multi-year funding of voluntary agencies. The only comparative insight on offer was that, in Italy, freshly plunged into yet another political crisis, some towns and cities now insist on buying most of their food from local farmers and suppliers.

But the aim of the day was to find strategies that offer credible, deliverable and effective solutions to poverty, and most of them, it seemed, had been parked at the registration desk. "Can we stop saying poverty is inevitable?" one delegate pleaded. But that same individual, and others, then had to fend off charges that around the victims of social and economic apartheid - whose own voice is rarely heard in such forums - a poverty industry has grown up that not only claims to represent their interests but also profits from that same advocacy.

It provides lots of well-meaning people with warm homes, cars in the drive, plasma TVs, meals out and two or three foreign holidays a year - the material aspirations that are now the norm for British citizens on average and above-average incomes. The longer the poor are still with us, the longer these groups have a professional raison d'etre. You could see some participants bristle with indignation at the very thought. But it was striking that the dispossessed, the real victims of social and economic apartheid, were nowhere to be seen.

The Herald co-sponsored this conference and it was my job to try to sum up, in 15 minutes, the entire day's proceedings. I took my inspiration from that woman from Easterhouse. You see, I grew up poor, in a material sense. Although my father was a skilled craftsman in the shipyards, his health was bad, his work casual and we had very little money. Even as a teenager in the late 1950s - an era, one of Tuesday's speakers recalled, when people dared dream that poverty might be eradicated - my winter coat was a cast-off from my father's boss's son.

While our home was cramped - four of us lived in a one-bedroom flat, rented from a private landlord - we didn't experience social apartheid. Mine was a richly loving and nourishing family with a wealth of community connections, many of them centred on our local church. And then there was the transcendent power of education, with the Robbins ladder opening up universities to bright working-class kids such as me.

Not so long ago I asked my mother, who never enjoyed a bathroom of her own until my father died in 1985, why our family had never qualified for council housing. Oh, we did, she replied, but your dad and I decided that, if we had gone to the scheme they were offering, "you two might never have got out of there again". Clearly, they had spotted apartheid in the making and opted for the material privations they already knew.

The kind of absolute material poverty we grew up in - a damp basement flat squeezed between the coal cellars and the outside toilet - is, happily, long gone for the vast majority of people. But relative poverty remains and has even got worse in the past two decades. A chart in last year's budget report shows the percentage of the whole population living below 60% of median household income - the government's official measure of relative poverty - running below 15% throughout the 1960s, the 1970s and the early 1980s.

By 1985, that percentage started to rise sharply. It hit 25% by the early 1990s. On the latest figures, it still stands around 20%. But politicians and pressure groups who all conspire to suggest that relative poverty can be abolished are guilty of peddling an aspiration which is all but undeliverable. In 2004/05, the gross income of the top quintile (fifth) of households in the UK was 16 times that of the bottom quintile. After taxes and benefits were taken into account, the differential was reduced to four-fold.

But if relative poverty were to be abolished altogether, if no household were to be condemned to an income below 60% of the median, no household could expect an income of more than 60% above the median either. In 2004/05, that would mean no household being entitled to keep anything it earned above, say, £40,000. Remember, we are talking households here, not individuals. That would require taxation, not of 40% on higher earners, but of 100% on lots of working couples earning little more than the average wage.

Some people on Tuesday - some decent, honourable people - seemed to think that is where we need to go, if poverty is to be abolished. But how many politicians would expect to get elected proposing tax hikes on that scale? It simply isn't credible. If we are to transcend poverty - and it is an insistent challenge in a world where the extremes of wealth and poverty look obscenely wide - we need to explore other pathways, too.

Redistributist fiscal policies have their part to play. But we also need to rebuild the non-material pathways that were open to people like me nearly half a century ago. Otherwise the poor will, indeed, always be with us.