ON Wednesday afternoons, dozens of socialists and trade unionists came together to sing a parting hymn, the Red Flag; it is a moment I will treasure for as long as I draw breath.

Our voices carried that anthem into a cloudless sky across the — for once — sunlit moorlands over the Firth of Clyde, as we said goodbye to my father.

It was a gathering of the whole family, some bound by blood, most bound in the struggle of the labour and trade union movement over my dad’s five decades of activism.

He’d been deputy general secretary of the CWU and sat on the Labour Party’s NEC on the union’s behalf for approaching two of those decades.

If he missed being a shop steward, he made up for it by taking on Cabinet ministers, leaders and prime ministers with the same guiding principles that he carried all his life.

As we sang, 300 miles away in a half-empty conference hall in the great city of Liverpool, another branch of his family were on their feet singing the same song. But the tone was somewhat different on the banks of the Mersey.

Unite and the CWU fought to have a debate on the Labour government’s decision to introduce a means test for the winter fuel allowance and put the lives — according to Labour’s own claims — of 4,000 pensioners at risk, but fell foul of the conference arrangements committee (CAC), which shifted the debate to ensure it didn’t take the shine off the speeches of the Chancellor or Prime Minister.

Instead, it was arranged for the last morning, safe in the knowledge that not only would many delegates already have begun their journey home, but the lion’s share of the CWU delegation would have been on the Clyde coast, along with countless delegates from other unions.

To the credit of those left in that conference hall, and to the eternal shame of the leadership, the call for the means test to be scrapped was won anyway.

The means test has been introduced to save cash that amounts to rounding error in the national Budget, is defended by urging pensioners to claim pension tax credit — a move that would negate any “savings” from the means test anyway, and was delivered by threatening newly elected backbenchers on support for jobs in their constituencies.

There is truly nothing about this outrageous decision that makes any political, economic or social sense.

Means testing has played an outsized role in Labour Party history in debate, in splits — not least with the Independent Labour Party — and in its sense of itself. The arguments have been, as they are to this day, along the lines of prioritising support of the most vulnerable and not handing money to “millionaires” (it’s always millionaires) with means testing, against ensuring no-one misses out and the socially unifying effects of universalism.

These arguments are as live now as they were when Ramsay MacDonald means-tested unemployment benefit in the 1930s.

I know which side I’m on. Universalism gives us the best chance of leaving no-one behind while other, greater, structural changes are brought about in our world to ensure the betterment of all.

The question we have to ask ourselves is why those ministers dutifully trotting out the lines about not handing cash to millionaires are so reluctant to do anything about the insult of their existence in the first place.

Why is it that our political class baulks at handing a millionaire £300, but fails to bat an eyelid when we hand that class millions in tax breaks every year?

Why do they risk those with an income of little more than £200 a week losing £300 a year while they cannot bear to countenance any reasonable tax on the assets and wealth that are the backbone of our society’s growing inequalities?

The “millionaires” argument is a farce, and is built on the hope the listener isn’t paying attention.

If the arguments in defence of the means test are so weak, the political costs so great, and the “savings” so little, why do it at all?

For my first 10 years as a councillor in Glasgow, every budget round would involve a proposed “saving” from Land and Environmental Services of around £100,000 to cut its assisted garden maintenance scheme for the over-70s.

Each time, it was refused, becoming something of a running joke.

No matter how bad things got, everyone knew that it would cause genuine upset with constituents who needed it, and anyway, what politician in their right mind would do such a thing to save such a small sum? The following SNP administration did it, of course.

The culture in the palace matters, and if politicians are not willing to challenge it with their mandate and a simple No, things tend to go wrong.

I can think of no greater example of this than when the Treasury converted to monetarism years before Thatcher took office, bouncing a Labour government into the unnecessary IMF loan and attendant cuts package that started us on the road to the “winter of discontent.”

What’s this got to do with the price of fish? Well, from the Winter Fuel Payment’s inception under Gordon Brown, the Treasury was never keen on it at all and even less keen on it as a universal benefit.

When this means-testing option was presented to Rachel Reeves, it required challenge but, sadly, she appears to have forgotten she no longer works for the Bank of England and that they and the Treasury now work for her on our behalf.

That the Chancellor failed to challenge a Budget option refused even by her Tory predecessors does not scream economic competence or stability at me. It screams corporate capture.

Other events over the last weeks have, of course, pointed at other, more blatant attempts at corporate capture.

It has been quite an incredible spectacle to watch “the grown-ups” who strived to take on the leadership of the Labour Party smirk as they tell interviewers how much their children really wanted to see Taylor Swift, making refusing thousands of pounds in corporate hospitality impossible.

Not a hint of embarrassment about it. Instead we’re expected to believe that it’s OK that the Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson can’t resist pester power, and the Chief Secretary to the Treasury Darren Jones’s inability to say no to his kids is justified because it’s not his thing — apparently demonstrated by his wearing a suit to the concert.

The Prime Minister himself has felt so bold as to challenge interviewees who question his moving to a sponsor’s Covent Garden penthouse as to whether he should have hung around at home and distracted his son from his GCSE exam revision.

Millions of kids around the country would love to go to those concerts, and their parents have no option but to say no. Millions of kids around the country have no quiet place to study but have to get on with it anyway. Meanwhile, we are expected to extend sympathy to people more than able to buy these things being handed them for free, and believe they are acts of corporate philanthropy.

If those in what purports to be the political arm of the labour and trade union movement, holding an enormous parliamentary mandate, can’t say no to a ticket to Taylor Swift, why should we be surprised they cannot stand up to Sir Humphrey?

The power to say no is what working people have strived for for centuries.

The power to resist enslavement, the power to resist being reduced to mere commodities, and the power to choose governments all rest on the power to say no.

Thankfully, if some of those on singing the Red Flag on the platform in Liverpool failed to grasp that fundamental, those lifting their voices on the Fairlie Moor knew exactly what it meant.

They live it. They understand why it matters now and into the future in every community and workplace in the land — just like the worker they sang it for.