THERE were two ways of dealing with the last fortnight. Hands over face, peeking out at the carnage unfolding, or step out into the world.

For the purposes of science, obviously, I tried both.

It began with Liz Kendall’s announcement on welfare reform. Literally millions of lives to — at best — be turned upside down to save a rounding error in the national budget. The language was that of tough love, the delivery was closer to that of the coked-up pal of the pub bully. Letters had been written by a collection of crawlers in advance to big up the “moral duty” of it all, to plant the seeds in our consciousness that this was a just fight.

It’s funny how things turn. The last Labour government brought in a requirement at all levels of government for equality impact assessments as part of the policy-making process. Kendall was however unable to confirm its existence, never mind its contents at the time of her announcement.

Had the government failed in its statutory duties, or was the answer unspinnable? Incompetent, or sociopathic? We’d have to wait 10 days to find out it had been done and 50,000 children would be plunged into poverty as part of her moral crusade.

In the meantime, the reaction was predictable up to a point. Most of the Parliamentary Labour Party went into hiding, with some notable exceptions of course. Most of the Socialist Campaign Group were quickly out of the blocks to condemn the move, Diane Abbott being foremost in their number, rightly going on to challenge the Prime Minister directly at question time.

Others were similarly quick. There is one contribution so majestically craven that I’m afraid I’ll have to cross a line to share.

Fresh from her speech, Kendall sat in the Commons chamber to field questions. Some members asked for detail, others questioned its fairness. As the chamber began to empty one member bounced up and down with an eagerness that for one tiny second seemed to offer the slightest hope that a shiver had somehow run up the bench behind the secretary of state and found a spine.

His presence in the ministerial doughnut zone should have told me otherwise.

The secretary of state craned around to bask in the full glory of the moment.

“My Right Honourable friend will agree that under the managed decline of the SNP, people in Scotland are more likely to be economically inactive than those in the rest of Britain.

“She will further agree that we have greater ambitions for the people of Scotland, particularly young people, than the Conservative Party. Does she agree that these reforms are absolutely necessary to put more Scots back to work, and back on the road to prosperity?”

Dr Zubir Ahmed there; MP for Glasgow South West, where 24.8 per cent of the working age population — 16,205 people — receive universal credit compared to a rate of 17.5 per cent for the whole of Scotland and 17.9 per cent for the whole of Britain.

For all the great things about places like Govan, they are still blighted by issues of multiple deprivation driven first by exploitation and deindustrialisation, and will still account for a fair share of the 26,803 claiming Personal Independence Payments or the 38,535 claiming Adult Disability Payment — its devolved successor — in Glasgow.

Maybe he’s banking on those thousands not voting at the next election, maybe he believes that the beggar-thy-neighbour rhetoric we are all subjected to every day will convince people to vote against their own material interests, or maybe it’s about his own material interests?

Tragically, he wouldn’t be the first MP to make such calculations, but there is the outside possibility he actually believes what he said.

After all, he went on to appear on BBC Scotland’s Debate Night programme and spoke very eloquently of the hardship he experienced as a child when his taxi-driving father went through periods of being unable to work through illness when he was forced to claim social security to get by.

The fact that, even under the present system, moving between work and claiming support for ill-health in that way would be incredibly difficult seems not to have occurred.

I’ve already wasted two paragraphs trying to make excuses for someone who has openly and fulsomely backed measures that will impoverish his constituents and carry on the decades-long austerity killing spree, but he is just one dangerous fool among hundreds — one more happy to sit by while language is twisted and abused to such an extent that “welfare” has become a dirty word.

In his letter of resignation from Labour in the wake of Kendall’s announcement, my friend Neil Findlay — like many on the left — made a point of stating his refusal to use the terms “benefits” or “welfare.”

I think we are getting that one wrong, and we have been for some time. Welfare is something we should be striving towards, not conceding to the right as an ill, or to the careerist as a punctuation mark in their life story of pulling up the ladder behind them.

Some words are worth fighting for, something the right understand all too well.

Earlier this week, I stood outside the Ministry of Defence building in Glasgow — a great beige blob of a bunker that looks like it was dropped from a height into the city centre.

A protest against cuts to the social wage got underway as the Chancellor took to her feet in parliament for the Spring Statement. As she spoke of £2.2 billion more in “defence” spending, I remembered that within living memory that department was known as the Ministry of War.

We are now in an age of “military Keynesianism,” apparently. Another tortured term. Whatever the rights and wrongs of Keynesianism, it understood the multiplier effect of government spending on the economy, it chose to prioritise minimising worklessness knowing that workers spend rather than squirrel their wages away in some account in the Cayman Islands.

What’s being proposed by Starmer couldn’t be further from anything Keynes dreamt up, because all evidence points to social spending being more effective in the economy.

Instead, we are told that in an ageing society, the pension system cannot be afforded while life expectancy falls.

We are told that we cannot afford social care, while people who need it are made to feel guilty for drawing a breath.

We are told the answer to our ills at home is to export bombs around the world.

Even if these lies were true the very ruling class who pump them out have spent decades profiteering off a fire-sale of industry that has left the country with barely the capacity to make steel, never mind build Starmer’s war economy.

Because that is what it must be called — a war economy — not “military Keynesianism” or any such twaddle. The very fact that conscription is now being openly discussed again is an admission of the economic illiteracy of a lazy, focus-group-driven jingoism which only ends in the mass grave.

As the foodbank queue gets longer, the appeal to patriotism grows ever more obscene.

It doesn’t take guts to send other people’s children to their deaths or make them killers, any more than it takes courage to take food out of the mouths of those you think cannot hit back.

They can hit back though. Not with weapons, destruction, or waste, but with all the creativity, talent, and hope that our government lacks.

Keynes once remarked that in the long run, we’ll all be dead. He had a point, so why not make life worth living for all here and now?

Welfare state or warfare state? I know which side I’m on.