AMONGST all those studies from which university academics earn their corn there must be one about the physical and mental health benefits of marching. As a nation we are never very far away from the publication of a health report abjuring us for our inactivity and encouraging us to walk every day. Too few of us, it seems, heed these warnings. Perhaps they should be urging us to march instead as we seem to be good at it and do not need to be asked twice.

This has been a halcyon year for marching in Scotland with Glasgow leading the way. The apotheosis of our affection for urban peregrinations was reached last weekend when it must have seemed from the space station that Glasgow had begun to shimmy.

Thousands embraced the streets to demonstrate their disdain for the visit of the 45th president of the United States of America and the following day many of the same people participated in the Pride march. Earlier this year Glasgow was one of three places to have hosted a pro-independence All Under One Banner march and more than 35,000 people turned out for that.

This isn’t intended to scorn the marches or the messages that they conveyed. Marching is brilliant. It’s a cheerfully raucous way of informing the wider world that your city and its people care about issues affecting both themselves and their brothers and sisters in other lands. The political right and its acolytes like to disparage these marches by saying that they are futile and achieve little. They dismiss them as ‘populist’; this being one of those words they and their cousins among the liberal elites like to reach for when they want to denigrate anything that occurs in large numbers.

The values and messages carried by Glasgow’s two big marches last weekend dovetailed beautifully with each other. One of them highlighted the racism, contempt for minorities and hatred of women of the world’s most powerful man. The other celebrated what can be achieved when discrimination and hatred is challenged.

The biggest story of this month in Glasgow and across Scotland, though, wasn’t the disgust many of us feel about the conduct of Donald Trump or the Brexit Monster’s Ball; it wasn’t about Pride or the controversy over Orange Parades. It was the revelation a few days earlier that 59 of the 100 most deprived housing estates in the UK were in Scotland and that 47 of these were in Glasgow. These shocking numbers were the result of an academic report into levels of deprivation in the last 40 years. The 18-month study was carried out by Liverpool University and examined 120,000 neighbourhoods and census figures between 1971 and 2011.

A wide assortment of factors was assessed, including unemployment, overcrowded households and car ownership. The academic who led the study said: “We found that though populations have changed, the levels of deprivation have not. I would have expected Glasgow and Scotland to be up there but not in such a pronounced way. I was surprised Glasgow was so dominant. We think it’s important that the Government look at these figures. The sheer consistency of Glasgow in the figures is surprising. But it fits in with what we know about the scale of deprivation and other problems in parts of the city.”

Initial shock soon gave way to something depressingly familiarity for all the usual ports of call in this highway of human misery were there: Possilpark, Milton and Ruchill; Calton, Bridgeton and Dalmarnock; Easterhouse, Pollok and Springburn. With the exception of Pollok on the south side these districts are all to be found in Glasgow’s north and east. Several of them would have featured in a similar roll-call of deprivation more than a century ago. In that time industries have come and gone; employment levels have risen and fallen; political administrations of the left and the right – Nationalist and Unionist – have all been in charge but the pattern of ill health and inequality remains the same. When the country is beset by an economic downturn these places receive the worst of it and when its fortunes rise again they are locked out of the windfall.

They are ours but we have made of them a different race and in a land of plenty we have excluded them. We do not speak their language and we have branded them, deeming them to be beyond our redemption and the evils which beset them as too complicated and too expensive to defeat.

The most distressing interview I’ve ever conducted was three years ago with Sir Harry Burns, formerly Scotland’s chief medical officer and a global authority on the causes of health inequality. A mere feature article could never do justice to the wisdom of this brilliant and compassionate man. He has been working against the currents which underpin the Liverpool University statistics for most of his adult life. He stressed the importance of early – very early – intervention in children’s lives by reaching out to their parents and he described how grinding poverty adversely affects a person’s mental faculties so that they start their lives two goals down, their God-given gifts choked at the outset.

Last week, too, we learned that Glasgow University has lodged plans for its new £1bn campus in the city’s anointed west end. The plans include walkways, plazas and (get this) the kinds of plants to be used. Thus the modern gospel of entitlement continues to be written: to those who have, more will be given. Of course Glasgow University isn’t responsible for any of the city’s ills but its £1bn would have been better spent building a new campus in the east end. It could fund research and initiatives into cures for social deprivation in the city that it serves. It would be a statement of intent and encourage other agencies to follow its lead.

We journalists are encouraged not to join marches and demonstrations no matter how much they may accord with our sympathies and our social views. I’d make an exception for a demonstration rebuking a society that has turned large parts of my city into ghettos and which treats the people in them like animals. One day – and that day draws ever nearer – those of us who witnessed this and yet did nothing will be called to account for our indifference.