MY daughter is about to turn 18, and in no particular mood to hang about. It looks like she’s going to be off to university in a few months, and the thought of her leaving fills me with pride, and dread in equal measure.

A bit of me hoped she’d stay in our city, but that’s no longer my call, and I’m wrong anyway.

She was born a week after I was elected to Glasgow City Council, and a few months before the biggest financial crash in corporate history. Whatever efforts we’ve put into giving her a decent start in life, austerity has dominated its entirety.

There were high hopes. Going to primary school in the 1980s, I remember dodging the buckets in the corridors every winter as the headteacher battled to coax a new roof out of the council. It would all be different, I told myself, as we sat in committee approving refurbs of the city’s primary schools - on conventional borrowing too, none of this PFI nonsense.

The results were heartening for a while as I looked out of the window to watch the roof being fixed and the playground being done up. She was only a couple of years into life at her high school - a PFI job from the turn of the century - when Covid ripped to shreds any lingering pretence that austerity’s damage was temporary.

In her life until then, she’d been on all the anti-austerity marches and rallies, had been to the foodbank and toybank locally, though through sheer luck not out of need. Her classmates have suffered the kinds of hardships their generation should only have known through the history books, malnutrition, homelessness, rapacious landlords hiking rents even as interest rates plummeted to their lowest in modern history.

By the time she reached her third graduation - yes, they graduate from nursery, primary and high school now, when did that start? - she had heard one of her teachers tell her higher class they would be put in with younger pupils as “the school can’t afford a supply teacher” forcing her cohort to get organised and make demands.

At that graduation, her head teacher told the school how well they had done despite the challenges which had of course included Covid, but also financial ones. She was right. What that class faced is not their fault, nor that of their teachers who do what they can with the hand they have been dealt by people who couldn’t have been further from that hall.

The damage that has been done to this generation is real, and just because the path Labour ministers and their bag-carriers have chosen to follow the Tories and Reform UK Ltd down the well-trodden path of dismissing rising anxiety and mental ill-health in the young doesn’t make it go away.

In the past few days we have engaged in that most British of pastimes, revelling in a glorious past, claiming glory for the dead. VE Day does merit commemoration of course. The millions of lives taken by fascism, and the millions of lives given in the course of stopping fascism in its tracks should always scream down the decades at us as warning of where neglect takes us, and what we are capable of.

On war memorials across the land we can read the inscription “to the glorious dead,” and yes, the cause of defeating fascism is glorious indeed, but you can’t take glory with you.
 

Official figures tell us that 383,700 members of the military of the UK and its colonies and 67,200 civilians died over the six bloody years of that war — 450,900 in total. We and their families can at least try to take some comfort in the thought their loss, while immeasurable, contributed to the defeat of the most horrific regime ever to have existed.

The countless survivors who came home and were expected to slip back into everyday life, injured in body and in mind by what they had witnessed — and by what they had been forced to do — could at least see a new world being born in their time putting the privations of past decades behind them.

Eighty years on, maybe it’s for the best that so few are now around to witness the threads of the world they tried to weave being plucked away, one by one.

My daughter learned about the war in primary school - what it was for, the leading figures, the great people’s effort to win and to build something better.

Leaving the school gates, another war was waging, one as old as time, but one waged with such renewed enthusiasm it would make Mrs Thatcher blush.

It is of course, the class war, because that is precisely what “austerity” is. In the wake of the banking collapse, the word reappeared in our everyday lexicon, along with “credit-swaps,” “quantitative easing” and the morphing of once unimaginable billions into mere bagatelles.

Until then, “austerity” was post-war thing. Rationing and controls persisting while the economy was re-tooled for rebuilding a shattered land, overseen by a man who even appeared suitably austere, Stafford Cripps - it sounded almost heroic.

That austerity at least had an end in sight, it offered some hope of improvement in the long-run, and even the NHS managed to be born in its shadow.

Does anyone really know anything positive the last 17 years of austerity has actually achieved?

Claims the second age of austerity would reduce debt or stabilise the economy have been proven so wildly off the mark as to be laughable.

As far as I can tell, it has achieved just three things so far.

It has successfully convinced the media/political complex that spending prior to 2007 was somehow “out of control”, and with it undermine even the most mild talk of growing the social wage.

It managed to ensure that the NHS was in the weakest possible state to deal with a pandemic.

It also managed to kill people. A lot of people. Estimates from the University of Glasgow and the Glasgow Centre for Population Health put the figure at around 335,000 between 2012 and 2019, and six years on the war is far from over and the grim meter is still running.

The return of a Labour government could have been the end of this disaster but, even as a few extra coins trickle into services, no claims to have brought austerity to a close stand up the slightest scrutiny while it takes the view that a welfare system which no longer promotes welfare, which already forces people through humiliating hoops in order to have enough money to cook a meal from a foodbank, was too generous under the Tories.

The second age of austerity has killed as many of our citizens as died in a world war against an existential fascist threat, and for what? No-one who has set foot in the real world can wander our crumbling streets today and truly believe anything got better.

Like any war though, the consequences lie not only in the killing, but in the living. We have at least a generation of young people who have been told that they shouldn’t expect support, that they don’t deserve it, that they are soft, swinging the leg, that they don’t deserve a home - that they are on their own.

As our political leaders this week posed with flags to remember the sacrifices made to defeat fascism, they choose militarism over people, suffering over the social wage, conscious cruelty over care, scratching their heads with studied “concerned face” as the far right grow.

It’s not “ignorant” kids sowing the seeds of a new fascism, but political elders blinded by ego and deafened to the echoes of history.

Maybe it’s time they went back to school.