Erik Cramb is dismayed by the UK government’s cruel cuts to disability benefits.
It has become fashionable recently for people in the public eye to be asked, “If you could speak or write to your younger self, what would you say?”
I am one of that now pretty ancient generation, a ‘war baby.’ I was born on the 26th December 1939. When the war ended, I was just 5 years old, so I’ve no real memory of the war years except people being out on the streets on VE Day, and even that memory is pretty hazy.
We, my parents, my younger brother, my grandma and I lived in a room and kitchen in a typical Glasgow tenement. My parents slept in a ‘cavity bed’ that was in the kitchen. My wee brother and I slept in a fold-down bed in the other room, grandly called the front room, where my grandma slept in another cavity bed.
My first real memory of the war, or more accurately the aftermath, was of my father – a sheet metal worker in the yards – jumping up and down with joy in the kitchen. He was not a man given to shows of emotion, so I rushed through to the kitchen to see what all the racket was about. There had been an election, which of course at 5 years old I knew nothing of. His unrestrained joy was because Churchill had been defeated and there was to be a Labour Government, led by Clement Attlee (pictured). All very baffling for a child because the only thing we knew about Churchill was he was the great hero who ‘had won the war!’
The background to this is a declaration that the Labour Party made in 1940. ‘The resources of the earth should be used as God’s gift to the whole human race and used with due consideration for the needs of the present and future generations’.
Let me leave that memory and turn to the present day.
Earlier this month, on the 18th of March 2025, the people who now run the Labour Party were declaring that social care benefits were unsustainable. Their cuts in disability benefits have been described as ‘sadism dressed up as political policies’ - while they are claiming these cuts have a ‘moral’ basis.
Meanwhile, in almost every corner of the land, the inheritors of the great comprehensive vision of that post-war Attlee Government are presiding over stretched public services, a severely diminished National Health Service and education provision at all levels stretched to near breaking point.
Though not quite mimicking Elon Musk with his chainsaw, they want to make huge cuts in the civil service.
Whilst not fully endorsing the ‘drill baby drill’ mantra of Donald Trump, they are wavering on measures to protect the planet for future generations.
Here in Dundee, the Health & Safety Partnership have just concluded a public consultation on their budget proposals. They have found the gap between the services the public rely upon and the finances available to them is now a yawning canyon. Still more savings are demanded of them. They are, I quote, ‘prisoners of their funders.’
Dundee University have a deficit so large that they are proposing to cut over 600 jobs and reduce the teaching and research facilities for which they have been rightly renowned. Many have argued that a key factor in this sorry situation is mismanagement of the University Court.
Whatever the truth of that, there is a wider context.
The question has been asked, is the situation at Dundee University the ‘canary in the coalmine?
I would contend that the evidence of our modern living is littered with already dead canaries!
More than half of teachers in both primary and secondary schools are reported to be considering alternative employment. Third sector organisations are at breaking point, refuse collection is being reduced, police forces are now an increasingly thin blue line. How has it come to pass that all that contributes to the common good is now deemed unaffordable? Has the economic vision of Clement Attlee that declared “Charity is a cold, grey loveless thing. If a rich man wants to help the poor he should pay his taxes gladly, not dole out money at a whim” been erased from the Labour Party’s collective memory?
Thirty years ago, the Labour Party maintained progressive principles. The 1994 ‘The Commission on Social Justice’, instituted by John Smith (often described as the best prime minister Britain never had) restated the following principles and propositions. (Perhaps it is to my 1994 self that I am now writing to my ‘Younger Labour Party Self’).
Four Principles.
1. The equal worth of all citizens before the Law.
2. The right of citizens to be able to meet basic income needs, shelter and other necessities.
3. The right to opportunities and life chances.
4. That, although not all inequalities are unjust, unjust inequalities should be reduced and where possible eliminated.
Four Propositions
1. That the Welfare State must be a ‘springboard for economic opportunity’.
2. That education and training needed investment to achieve this and were currently insufficient.
3. That there was a need for a better balance between employment, education and family responsibilities to give better choices to people.
4. That social institutions from the family to local government needed improvement.
Perhaps, just perhaps, some of this still lingers in the collective memory - but where is the courage to pursue these ideals?
Whatever ‘morality’ is being claimed for Rachel Reeves and Liz Kendall's announcements about welfare, as she presents it as being a springboard for getting people into work, it is obscene to seek to balance the books on the backs of the poor, the voiceless, the powerless and those with disabilities.
It is craven cowardice to ignore the need for a wealth tax like that suggested on those who have £10 million in assets. It is to the eternal shame of many rich and powerful people that they will not pay taxes willingly, seeking all manner of ways to avoid and evade. It is a sign of a diminished conscience not to grasp that the ability to pay tax is a privilege and is a worthy task. They, the super-rich are the poorest of poor souls.
The distortion of global finance is so vast that it seems beyond redemption. ‘The Market’ that rules the world of finance looks indestructible. But slavery was abolished, apartheid overcome, and these examples of injustice overcome began with acts of courage somewhere, often unseen at the time.
John Smith had been the Leader of the Opposition for less than two years, yet his death brought the whole nation to a virtual standstill. Why was that?
Perhaps it was simply that our nation’s politics had become so diseased, so corroded by blatant lies and the flaunting of the self-interest of the rich and powerful that the public warmed to this man who they believed cared about truth and fairness.
Since the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in many ways our estrangement from Westminster has steadily been increasing. We live in a different era from 1945, and even 1994.
Given the policies of Starmer, Reeves Kendall and their colleagues, I am not the only supporter of the Labour Party who is feeling today that, in order to enshrine the great principles of our forebears, perhaps the best advice I could have given to my younger self would have been to ‘nurture a seed’, and work to establish an independent party that would have really sustained the values that Attlee and Smith embodied.
Published 28 March 2025