THIS week's Community Column is written by Argyll and Bute's Westminster MP, Brendan O'Hara.

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A couple of weeks ago The Tower in Helensburgh generously gave over an evening for a special showing of Ken Loach’s film I, Daniel Blake.

All the money raised that night went to support the great work being done by the Helensburgh and Lomond Food Bank.

It was a well-attended evening and so powerful was the depiction of poverty in the UK today, there was barely a dry eye in the house when the lights went on at the end.

If you haven't yet, please go and see it as everyone should see what poverty is and how the current benefits system can trap people into spiral of poverty from which it is sometimes impossible to escape.

Although specifically about benefit sanctions and set in Newcastle, I Daniel Blake could have been set anywhere in the UK…even right here in Helensburgh, where people in our community are being left bewildered as they try and pick through the benefits bureaucracy.

Just a couple of hours before I went to The Tower, my office received a desperate call from a couple whose circumstances had changed and they’d just been told the benefit payments to which they were fully entitled, would be delayed two weeks.

This was a couple who had never been in this situation before and simply didn't know what to do.

By the time they called my office, they were in crisis. They had no food in the house and just over £2 left on their pre-paid power card to last them a fortnight.

Thankfully, we were able to alert the Helensburgh and Lomond Food Bank and another local charity who were able to provide food and a top-up for the power card.

It is outrageous that in 2016, a couple in our town, a couple who are approaching retirement age can find themselves in such a predicament.

With this in mind, last Friday I stayed at Westminster to support my colleague Mhairi Black MP’s private members bill, The Benefit Claimants Sanctions (Required Assessment) Bill; which proposed making an assessment of what the effect of sanctions would be on a claimant and their family before they were made.

The vast majority of SNP MPs turned up to support what I thought was a very reasonable and fair amendment to the existing legislation, so I was shocked when only a handful of Tories turned up to oppose the Bill and almost no Labour MPs bothered attending.

The Bill was eventually “talked out” and didn't even go to the vote.

What have we have become as a society if a small measure such as this cannot move the UK parliament to rebalance the scales, even just a fraction on the side of the poor.