Lesley Riddoch: Another turn in the wrong direction from Rachel Reeves

Everyone over the age of 30 has heard the same empty promise from David Cameron, George Osborne, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and the Lettuce herself, Liz Truss. Jam tomorrow always justifies cuts today against the most vulnerable.

Why should anyone believe Ms Reeves is different?

Her Labour is the party of builders not “blockers”. The party of workers not slackers. To be fair that last slogan isn’t official party policy. Yet. But read the subtext. The question is, will it work?

That largely depends on which of the Chancellor’s statements yesterday got you going.

Was it her Churchillian claim that Labour will turn Britain into “a defence industrial superpower” – handing megabucks to arms manufacturers and creating growth through war?

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Or her assertion that Labour’s planning reforms will promote big economic growth through house building in England?

Or the section of her speech that was blink and you miss it. Those much heralded £5 billion cuts to social security.

True – hard-boiled OBR economists expect more people will likely pass the new tougher tests than government officials believe. Too many blasted humans in the assessment process.

Still, other cuts mean the Reeves package is back to nearly £5bn. Which means 800,000 people on PIP will lose an average £4500 each. And 250,000 people will be plunged into poverty including 50,000 children.

When she heard that the fairly plummy presenter of Radio 4’s World at One had the good grace to grind to a sudden halt.

It’s appalling. As appalling as the Tory cuts 12 years ago.

Surfing through old diary notes recently I found this from January 2013.

“I’m at welfare event today. Just spoken to Morag Gillespie from Glasgow Caley Uni who says she has reduced disabled people to tears talking about likely conseqs of benefits reforms. So much so she is having to think about impact of spelling out too clearly how life may deteriorate in interests of mental health, avoiding despair and possible suicide. It is looking that bad.”

Here we are again.

In her Guardian column this week, erstwhile Reeves/Starmer cheerleader Polly Toynbee was also thinking back to the Cameron/Osborne years.

The headline read: “Thirteen years ago, Emma told me disability cuts nearly broke her family. Now, under Labour, it’s worse. £5bn cuts is a stain Labour may never be rid of.”

Now I’m sure Ms Toynbee could be deafened by the calls of “told you so” from almost every SNP front bencher. But it is significant that prominent supporters like herself have publicly jumped ship over these punitive cuts.

The question is, how many Labour MPs will follow?

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The Resolution Foundation warns that the number of children living in poverty across the UK could rise to 4.6 million under the Labour government, the highest level on record.

How does that sound to Torsten Bell – head of the lefty Resolution Foundation until the General Election when he became a Labour MP and then Treasury minister. Unbelievably he was defending the £5bn cuts earlier this week on Newsnight.

Scottish backbencher Brian Leishman will vote against the cuts package along with one or two English colleagues. But how many more will keep their heads down as consciences and reputations are bent completely out of shape?

The under-reported protest outside Westminster yesterday was led by Ellen Morrison-Smith Labour’s NEC Disability Rep who made the hugely important point that PIP actually HELPS disabled people stay in work.

Emma – Polly Toynbee’s correspondent – is a case in point.

Thirteen years ago she was living with her husband and three disabled children in a two-bedroom home. Today her marriage has broken up, Emma has severe rheumatoid arthritis and relies on PIP to finance a car and wheelchair to reach her NHS job.

Her kids are grown but all three are also on PIP which helps the eldest son hold down a job, helps her wheelchair-using daughter get to school and helps her son who needs help even to cross the road. But because he is under 22, he will no longer qualify for PIP.

Neither, it seems, will Emma. She must score four points for one single incapacity. “I have 13 points in total, but only twos or threes for any one activity” – things like help to dress or wash the lower body, managing incontinence, bathing or showering and cutting up food.

Emma doesn’t have four points for any single one of these needs. So, thanks to Reeves’s changes she could lose her claim, lose thousands of pounds and lose her job.

Is there an alternative?

The SNP point out that reversing Brexit would create more long-term growth than all the Chancellors cuts and wheezes.

Shadow chancellor under Jeremy Corbyn John McDonnell asks, if the Chancellor says the world has changed, why hasn’t her strategy changed, when even “iron laws welded into Germany’s constitution are being adapted to the new economic realities”.

But there’s a bigger question. Can the Labour Party possibly survive this dereliction of duty?

A quarter of a million cast into poverty. Can Labour really survive that?

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My podcast colleague Pat Joyce this week recalled the 1930s when Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald crossed the floor to join Tories and Liberals in an austerity National Government which recommended draconian cuts in government spending – 20% cut in teachers’ pay; a 25% cut in service pay; and a 20% reduction in unemployment benefits – all in a bid to balance the books. Sound familiar?

Liberal leader Sir Herbert Samuel said later: “[Since] the necessary economies would prove most unpalatable to the working classes, it [was useful that] they were imposed by a Labour government.

“If he [Ramsay MacDonald] failed to secure the support of a sufficient number of his own colleagues, then the best alternative would be a National Government composed of members of the three parties. It would be preferable that Mr MacDonald should remain Prime Minister.”

All could see the usefulness of a Labour Prime Minister delivering hammer blows to working class people. And the usefulness of Labour’s subsequent implosion as a party.

MacDonald was expelled from the Labour Party which then suffered a terrible defeat in the General Election and endured a long-lasting split. As Tony Benn recalled in his diaries, “party membership cards in Bristol had little holes in them where the photograph of Ramsay MacDonald had been cut out”.

And the economic crisis? The huge sacrifices imposed on working people didn’t kickstart recovery. Ironically it took Britain’s transformation into a war economy to achieve a temporary boom.

Almost a century later, Labour look set to do that again. It’s unlikely to fix Britain’s sad economic and political demise.

And that’s worth remembering amidst the gloomy predictions of economic turmoil that would face an independent Scotland. Yes, independence would be tough.

But Scotland would never have sold off the family silver as Margaret Thatcher did in the 80s, allowing energy prices to spiral. Scotland would not have left the EU, haemorrhaging dreadfully from the trade and workers lost annually by Brexit.

Scotland would be balancing its books with home-grown wind, tidal, wave, hydro and hydrogen instead of relying on imported gas like Westminster. We wouldn’t be spending billions on Trident’s replacement or costly nuclear power plants. We wouldn’t have wasted £50 billion on HS2.

If Scotland had voted Yes in 2014 we would have made mistakes. But Westminster has not just made mistakes. It has taken the wrong direction – decade after decade, prime minister after prime minister, chancellor after chancellor.

We must have the courage to believe Scotland can build back far better.