THE nights are fair drawin’ in, as they say. The gales have arrived, knocking the withered leaves from the trees, only to be washed down a gully in the torrents of rain… promptly blocking the drain.  

It’s the annual reminder, should any be now necessary at all, that services aren’t what they used to be. The only broom to sweep a gutter these days will be found in your cupboard, not the back of a council wagon.

Somewhere in a far-off place, a resident will emerge from her home next week onto the most immaculate street in the land. Regularly swept for litter, listening devices and explosives, only journalists and the endless procession of new MPs posing for selfies on the steps of No 10 litter Downing Street.

Next week, the new resident at No 11 will emerge, blinking, into the precious autumnal sunlight, not with a new broom, but a shiny red box full of papers. Before Rachel Reeves moved in she warned us all of the tough decisions to be made in those papers, all guided by an unshakeable adherence to “fiscal rules” she had made up.

Rules are funny things. I generally accept the need for them, even if I’m apt to stray on grammar from time to time. They are our way of making sense of the world, once hooked on religion, and now in science they are discovered as patterns in data which often go on to guide the very research which will one day, inevitably, revise them. 

At the election, we were told the Chancellor’s fiscal rules were drawn up to convince the electorate that Labour could be trusted with the economy once more, but this bears little scrutiny. There are few out there that trust any government with the economy these days, not least because governments have spent decades telling them that it is something they cannot direct, merely manage.

A second, and increasingly circulated, explanation is that the fiscal rule is required to keep the bond markets happy after the farce of Liz Truss’s mini-budget.

The latter nudges closer to the truth, though claims last month that means-testing winter fuel payments was needed to keep the markets happy was apparently greeted with laughter on the trading floors. 

Imagine worshipping a deity openly laughing at you. Rules don’t fall from a heaven or rise from a hell — they are made right here on Earth where they are broken, and so it has been proven once more.

Just the tweak of a few words in Reeves’s papers change how the government calculates its debt, and “allows” another £20 billion for long-term investment. 

Imagine that. Government debt hasn’t changed in the slightest, the Chancellor has simply decided to look at it through a different pair of spectacles. We are honestly expected to believe that the ghouls on the markets were going to be spooked on Halloween by more borrowing before, but now they will rest in peace.

It’s definitely pantomime season.

In Scotland the draft Budget will be published on December 4, and the SNP Scottish government have been busily lobbying for increased UK spending to take the edge off the cuts they will impose.

While this is perfectly acceptable in my eyes, it is a strange argument to make while aligning with big oil to lobby against extensions to windfall taxes, or complaining about possible increases in employers’ National Insurance, but — Keir Starmer take note — that’s the price of trying to be a party for a nation and not a class.

Their erstwhile coalition partners in the Scottish Greens have called for action at Holyrood level to curb the cuts, demanding a mansion tax and an end to council cuts in return for getting the SNP’s Budget over the line.

We now return to the old Scottish pantomime of “will they/won’t they.” 

There’s more doubt this year perhaps, but that’s the hell of relativism for you — they’ve facilitated SNP Budgets that have decimated local government for years now, delivering Scotland’s biggest-ever PFI flogging the nation’s forests as part of the coalition, and I hold out little hope for anything other than a reversion to pre-coalition rhetoric.

Meanwhile libraries stand mothballed, hundreds of teaching posts are going and some councils are even looking at schools closing early.

The sectoral bargaining promised for five years in social care by the Scottish government is off the table for another two, hundreds of people live in homes wrapped in lethal, flammable cladding without a single Scottish home remediated in the seven years since Grenfell, and still the STUC’s calls to raise more tax go unanswered. 

Pantomime season always accompanies winter.

It’s been a long one already though. The damage done over the decades has been incalculable. Yes, we can cost the job of unblocking the drain or opening a library, but the greater cost is in expectation and hope. 

Years of driving home the message of politicians’ powerlessness in the face of the market has trashed the public’s faith in politics; but years of austerity have almost wiped out any belief there might have been that tax might help, and lowered expectations of  public service, while trade union membership has halved since its 1980 peak of 13.2 million.

These long shadows will endure for a time, even when the crisp and clear spring days return. All the more important then that we spend our winter well. 

The successful strikes, pickets and protests of recent years have lifted the sights of millions, lifted people’s heads and begun to reverse a decline in union membership, but there’s is still a long way to go.

As trade unions were positively delegitimised over recent decades, connections to community as a normal part of everyday life were too often lost too, but the Trade Unions in Communities Hub in Edinburgh’s Niddrie is a green shoot in the barren ground of austerity — a glimpse of what could be.

Its beginnings lay in Unison organiser Derek Durkin encouraging his branch to buy a van to act as a mobile office when attempting to organise in the often hostile environment of social care.

In a few short years it snowballed — with a partnership including the CWU’s Scotland No2 branch and RMT organiser Mick Hogg — to culminate in opening a building in one of the capital’s most deprived communities; offering help, advice and solidarity to an area often overlooked by the city’s political classes.

A building might seem to be an old-fashioned approach, but nothing could be further from the truth. It was born of a need for trade union reps who these days often have to travel between workplaces having a central resource to work from, but it also provides somewhere for the growing army of those who work from home to see other human beings as well as seek advice.

Its very presence in a community deprived of resources by the actions of those who throw themselves at the altar of the market is a statement of intent — a visible, accessible, centre of resistance, sowing the seeds of solidarity.

We should never let the politicians north or south of the border off the hook for taking the easy way out and attacking communities before for fear of saying “boo” to the market, but nor should we wait.

Life is too important to be left in their hands alone, let them dance to our tune — ideally with a broom.

Now the music’s playing,
And the writing’s on the wall, 
And all the dreams you painted,
Can be seen by one and all,
Now you’ve got them thinking,
And the future’s just begun,
For you sowed the seeds of freedom,
In your daughters and your sons. 
Tommy Sands