GLASGOW City Council has once again led the way this week. On Thursday it stood firm in its unswerving commitment to destroying itself and the services it delivers to its citizens because “tough choices.”

The factions on the council battled it out in a bizarre game of whose choices were the toughest, but they all voted to cut over £100 million from services over the next three years. 

The process for forming these budgets is instructive. Political groupings are furnished with lists of “budget options” from the various departments showing how they can do their bit to close the “budget gap.”

Traditionally, departments go down one of two routes. They attempt to go further than required to ingratiate themselves with what passes for political leadership, or they defend their budget by offering a series of unworkable or politically unpalatable options — often tragically referred to as “bleeding stumps.”

Layered upon these we have the Micawberesque cuts, planned through reforms in coming years, many of which are known to be entirely undeliverable by anyone paying attention but are so large and vague in nature as to be irresistible to desperate councillors who hope “something will turn up” to save them from any disastrous implementation. 

High on the illusion of choice, groups then pick, and then run it by the finance officer for the approval required for their budget to even make it onto the order paper. 

Then we have budget day and the annual pantomime of everyone in the room — you have to vote if present — claiming ownership of departments’ “budget options” and arguing theirs is the nicest way to kill the future. 

Does that last phrase sound melodramatic? Perhaps, though I live in a city filled with communities which have yet to recover from the 1981 UK budget, let alone the numerous social disasters visited upon them since then. 

The driving force behind that budget was unashamedly political, setting the course for the barbaric politics of Thatcherism which would go on to define the parameters every chancellor operated in since — including Holyrood, even if the rhetoric is somewhat cuddlier from time to time. 

The underfunded council tax freeze in Scotland is simply a rebadging of the rate-capping employed by Thatcher, just as the SNP’s Scottish Future’s Trust is no more than an evolution of Tony Blair’s public-private partnerships, themselves a rebranding of John Major’s public finance initiative.  

Those policies have something in common, allied to their complete subservience to capital, and that is they have all been mercilessly imposed on local government. 

The attitude to councils from all governments is that they are merely arms-length opportunities to offload cuts they are either too gutless to take credit for, or too cowardly to challenge. 

Meanwhile in councils, the SNP and Greens are too scared to challenge their coalition in Holyrood and Labour is still tripping on the delusion that displaying a public willingness to destroy services in opposition is somehow a qualification for power. 

This tragedy is only compounded by the presence of decent elected members in each of those parties, well aware of the futility of carrying on with the ritual, who are swept along by their parliamentarians’ cowardice anyway. 

All this talk of cowardice takes me seamlessly to Sir Keir Starmer, the man who would rather see kids line up in a foodbank queue than scrap the two-child cap. Few embody the fetishisation of “tough choices” better than he, in fact I’m sure that in the unlikely event he ever reads these lines, he would read them with pride. 

In recent interviews on him having to withdraw Labour support from its placeman candidate in Rochdale, Azhar Ali, or justify abandonment of the already woefully inadequate £28 billion Green New Deal he has struggled to contain his eagerness not only to talk about tough choices, but to call himself “ruthless.”

It’s laugh-out-loud stuff, but I’ve always taken the view that people who have to go around talking about how hard they are hide some deep-seated insecurities, and Sir Keir encapsulates this beautifully. 

The man lives in terror. It’s etched on his face whenever a camera is pointed at it and whenever even the most softball questions are put to him — let’s be honest, he faces little else. 

Why would he feel this way? I don’t doubt for a moment that he’s an intelligent man, what’s there to feel insecure about? 

I met him many years ago when he came to Glasgow to meet with officers working on housing Syrian refugees. They were all impressed by his mastery of the brief, and when he met with refugees themselves by the empathy he displayed. Dare I say it, I was too. 

The intervening years have not been kind, though. The basic humanity we witnessed that day is in short supply when he talks of asylum and immigration these days. Such has been the dissembling over the issue of flying people seeking asylum in Britain to Rwanda, for example, that opposition to the plan could only be expressed in terms of value for money. 

The lack of any sort of moral anchor from a man who was a human rights lawyer, even on something as basic as that, utterly fails to challenge the narrative driven by a resurgent far right that refugees are a burden and stores up danger when he enters No 10. 

Maybe he knows this, maybe that’s what troubles him somewhere in the dark recesses of his consciousness. I do hope so. 

He gives the impression at times of the reluctant hero in one of those old Jimmy Stewart movies, carried aloft by an adoring crowd to the lectern, unsure of what he did to win the adulation but utterly speechless when he gets there. 

Compare with his predecessor who enjoyed such adulation in the real world, and had more than a thing or two to offer when after decades of honing his beliefs he got to that lectern. 

Therein lies the false dichotomy many of us in the Labour Party are reminded of by the right all the time. 

The left stands accused of valuing protest over power, of refusing to compromise with the electorate on issues ranging from nationalisation right back to the slash and burn going on in local government, while the right say the purpose is power itself. 

It’s not power they gain though, merely office. 

The result is that that every time the Tories gain power, openly enriching their friends, gutting services and looting the state until they eventually embarrass their friends in the right-wing press, there is a ratcheting effect. 

Communities of this country and every other around the world are crying out for an alternative, for governments to put people and planet first. Instead, we have political zombies of the centre offering the status quo and succour the far right, and reassuring capital that they will take office but not power. 

In councils, we live in age of the narcissism of small differences, of national government laughing at two bald men not just arguing over a comb but on how best to scalp the people around them. 

They shouldn’t be so smug.  

After all, who’s really laughing when that very same narcissism rules every legislature in the land?