THE heart slows with age, despite all my best efforts, but that’s just a trend. There are still moments when the muscle memory kicks in, and it forgets itself.

A wander around Glasgow city centre today is not what it was. The streets once thronging with revellers of an evening now sit empty, and people who once had homes camp in the doorways of deserted shopfronts in numbers I can’t recall in my lifetime. At the beginning of the century, the city began the process of closing its hostels as street homelessness fell. There was a sense that the tide was turning, however slowly.

Perhaps the greatest crisis of world capitalism changed that, changed a government, brought austerity and a new, open, acceptance from our political classes of just how low we could sink as a society to keep a bond trader in trips to the Caribbean.

There was a time when the phrase “austerity” was a reference to something quite different. Sir Stafford “austerity” Cripps, as the name and title would suggest, was a flawed man. His time at No 11 after the war wasn’t exactly a time of milk and honey for the workers out there who had toiled to defeat fascism and were forced to continue to toil on rationed food and pay, but at least then there was some sense of hope, some sense of re-ordering in the background, some understanding that the foundations of better were being put into the ground.

The hardship was real, but taxes on wealth and income — mainly delivered by his predecessor, Hugh Dalton — helped deliver some of the things we still hold dear today, not least the NHS and council housing.

Where are we now? The latter is riddled with the predatory landlordism it was built to eradicate, and the former has been starved for decades in a concerted effort to undermine its credibility and win consent to open the doors to profiteers.

The austerity undertaken after a world war against fascism, a total war in which virtually all productive capacity was directed at winning, lasted barely a decade. Seventeen years on, ours continues.

The hardships of rationing and wage freezes then were at least leavened by food subsidies, expanding services and the hope of a secure, safe home in the future. As we approach the third decade of our austerity, and the fifth decade of wage stagnation, the pay-off has been a public realm so withered that it can barely raise a finger to direct you to the foodbank queue.

Last year Labour was elected on a landslide comparable, in terms of seats, at least, to that of the one Cripps served in. Hope in the new iteration passed for some vague chat about “growing the economy,” the ghost of John F Kennedy’s “rising tide lifts all boats” rhetoric haunting the Chancellor’s every media appearance.

It’s a great piece of imagery. It makes instinctive sense, and aren’t we all just trying to bob along together into a beautiful sunset anyway?

The metaphor was made famous by a man whose almost infinite wealth enabled him to pay someone else to write his words while he went yachting off the coast of one of the richest neighbourhoods on the planet.

Not all boats are created equal. Some will have helipads and submersible launches, and roam the seas crewed to the nines. Others lay tethered, abandoned as the tide overwhelms them.

Nonetheless, the Chancellor, the Prime Minister and assorted acolytes stand hopefully on the pier, staring expectantly at the horizon for any hint of a swell, breaking concentration only to call in the navy at the first sign of a dinghy of refugees. The tide they hope for is the same tide every government has bet the house on in my lifetime: an asset boom.

Asset booms give the government nice numbers to look at without the effort. No work involved, just watch the prices of assets grow. Then watch people borrow to the hilt on the basis of this imaginary value, safe in the knowledge that the debt will ensure they behave themselves in the workplace and don’t do silly things like go on strike to get a fraction of what they are worth.

Given who wins in that warped version of growth, I’m prepared to concede that the boats analogy does have a kernel of truth, after all, little more than 2 per cent of British households own any kind of boat at all.

Back on Sauchiehall Street, the doorways remain busy with cardboard and sleeping bags on the site of what used to be the Glasgow Empire. The Empire closed in 1963 to the strains of the Red Army Choir, but over the decades, its audience had become famous and infamous in equal measure for its brutal treatment of acts who fell short or showed the slightest hint of fear.

One incident that passed into legend was the performance by Mike and Bernie Winters, billed as comedians. The story goes that straight man Mike had been on the stage on his own at first, struggling away as the audience bayed for blood. When his brother burst onto the stage to join him, he was greeted with “Aw Christ… there’s two of ‘em!”

This weekend, we’ll find out who Labour has elected as its new deputy leader. The choice was stark: a Blairite, or a Blairite.

I’m being harsh. They have different accents. Bridget Phillipson has been portrayed as Starmer’s choice, while Lucy Powell has somehow managed to become the insurgent candidate who can deliver the party from its malaise and pilot the prince across the water — Andy Burnham — into the parliamentary jetty and on to No 10.

The concept of Powell as a rebel has caused no end of hilarity in this household, not least because of her central role in delivering Labour into its present vast, visionless void.

It has genuinely been laugh-out-loud stuff to hear both candidates talk about scrapping the two-child cap they voted to keep a few months ago as, with excruciating predictability, they pitch for the support of a membership who now know without any shadow of a doubt that in a campaign propped up by — to be generous — extraordinarily dubious funding, they were systematically lied to in the last leadership contest by the individual now squatting in No 10.

The word is that the cap will go at the Budget. I sincerely hope it will, but the damage is done. That being seen to be dragged kicking and screaming to doing the right thing might be bad seems to be a lesson that the grown-ups in the Labour leadership are incapable of learning, despite it becoming a quarterly event.

When the announcement is made on which accent will accompany Sir Keir, I’ll be in Edinburgh at the Scotland Demands Better rally along with thousands of others. Its focus is naturally enough on not just the Scottish government’s carnival of conceited careerism, but on extracting some sort of action to support the working class from the functionally dead parliament they sit in.

A government in Scotland that has survived for nearly two decades on being marginally less bad than the worst Tory governments in recorded history is on course to be handed a fourth term by Labour.

So confident are they of victory, the SNP government announced a five-year plan to slash billions from public spending and 12,000 public-sector jobs with no apparent consequences.

Will a rally change that? No, but neither will some prince across the water.

We can enjoy our day, meet, listen and be heard, but when buzz goes and the heart slows, what then?

We go back to the quiet and not-so-quiet works of solidarity that will one day “give the world another heart, and other pulses.”

No excuses.