Last week’s report for the End Child Poverty campaign prepared by the Institute for Fiscal Studies confirmed what many of us were already all too aware of: George Osborne’s emergency budget will hurt the poorest the most. It’s no surprise that a budget whose headline measures included an increase in VAT, freezing child benefit and linking future increases in welfare benefits to the less generous consumer price index will be highly regressive in its effect, hitting ordinary families hard. Meanwhile, the Fawcett Society has begun legal action, arguing that the budget bears significantly more harshly on women, and now it emerges that Theresa May had warned the Treasury before the budget of the need for an equalities impact assessment, one that it was likely to fail.

Ministers are more than a little miffed at this wave of criticism, and have hit back at the IFS’s findings. Their strongest argument is that the IFS has failed to take account of the increase in employment that ministers say will result from measures such as welfare reform and cuts in corporation tax. That, they argue, will lift more families out of poverty – yet a range of commentators, from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development to George Osborne’s own Office of Budget Responsibility cast doubt on the government’s employment claims.

The government’s other argument, that there’s no alternative, public spending must be cut, owes more to ideology than to proper stewardship of the economy or to fairness. And here is where the battle for hearts and minds must take place. We know that the pain that’s coming from swingeing cuts to public spending, frontline jobs and services will be highly damaging, and lasting in its effect. The long-term damage as young people struggle to get into higher education or onto the employment ladder, the risk to families under increasing pressure as financial support is cut, the harm that is done by reducing investment in the crucial early years – health in pregnancy grants, Sure Start, Playbuilder and Building Schools for the Future – all this sets back a whole generation of children and young people, damages their wellbeing, their future potential and lifechances. That’s bad for individual, bad for the economy, wasteful for society as a whole.

The ConDem government clearly doesn’t get why the underpinning support of the welfare state is so important, both as a safety net and as a springboard to enable people to get on and get ahead. Yet for Labour it’s always been fundamental, from the visionary ambition of the post-war Attlee government to the bold New Labour programme of social justice and redistribution effected under Blair and Brown.

Now our job is once again to make that case compellingly to the public, and to expose the huge gulf between us and the government, not exaggerate divisions among ourselves. And we can be confident and courageous in doing that. After all, we should not forget the popularity that Labour’s progressive policies enjoyed from 1997, or ignore the public outrage at the culture of excessive rewards for a few that brought our financial system to its knees, and nearly brought the economy down.

Labour came out of a bad election defeat surprisingly united, up for the fight, in good heart. That’s because we share a vision, and we know the scale of the threat. In the weeks and months ahead, our job is to re-convince the voters of our competence, our integrity, our radicalism, and our commitment to a better future for all. Head-on measures to reduce inequality mark us out as 100 per cent different from the ConDem government, offer the fairest future to the many, the surest route to sustainable economic recovery, and lie at the heart of our Labour values. Let’s be bold in speaking out for them now.

Photo: HM Treasury