“We just cannot make promises that we cannot afford to keep,” said Labour’s Shadow Culture Secretary Lucy Powell on Thursday. So why does Keir Starmer keep making them? In the past few years, he has promised to end outsourcing in the NHS, abolish Universal Credit, abolish university tuition fees, invest £28 billion a year in green technologies, guarantee childcare from the end of parental leave until the end of primary school, increase income tax for the highest earners, abolish the House of Lords… There is now a seemingly endless list of promises that Keir Starmer’s Labour party have made and disowned in the space of a parliamentary term in opposition.

This week, Labour U-turned on their promise to scrap the two-child benefits cap, a policy described as “vicious” by a Conservative welfare minister at the time of its announcement, “punitive” by Starmer, and “obscene and inhumane” by his deputy, Angela Rayner. I wholeheartedly agree: the policy is cruel, dehumanising and should be abolished. But I also recognise the fact that the majority of the public disagrees with me: 60 per cent of British people polled by YouGov last week agreed with keeping “a two-child limit on the number of children parents can claim child‑related welfare benefits for”.

It is worth reflecting on why that is. I know people who would love more children but cannot afford the extra childcare costs, a bigger house or the extra expenses – and it may seem intuitively unfair to them that they should pay for a stranger to have more children when they can’t afford to themselves. But Starmer should have the courage to articulate how a decade of punishing Conservative austerity has created this miserable situation and outline his vision of a country where no one is held back from having children because of low wages, expensive childcare or poor housing. Instead, he chose the easy option. He chose to follow rather than lead.

Given the Uxbridge byelection result, one can probably assume that Starmer has already been on the phone to London’s Mayor, Sadiq Khan, and told him to ditch his policy on ultra-low emission zones – seen by some as the reason Labour lost that contest. Forget saving the planet and a cleaner environment, Starmer is in a race to the bottom.

This is a severe deficit in a political leader, and one also seen in the Scottish Labour Party. This week, once again, Scottish Labour politicians found themselves being sent out to obediently defend a plainly self-destructive policy on the orders of their London headquarters. There was something ludicrous about hearing Anas Sarwar try to convince himself that investing in the long-term future of this country by tackling child poverty would “spook the markets”. I can only hope that he doesn’t honestly believe that.

I found myself thinking the same when listening to Powell on her broadcast round this week. She justified Starmer’s announcement by repeatedly telling interviewers “there just is no money left”. This was exactly what David Cameron and George Osborne said when they slashed funding for public services in the name of their ideologically-driven austerity project, telling the public that was “no money left” and the “cupboard was bare”.

The most generous interpretation of these statements is that the person making them does not understand how state finances work. The worst is that they are knowingly misleading the public. States can run a deficit, they can borrow money at high interest rates, or can increase taxes, all of which are difficult decisions for governments to make. But an advanced economy like the UK simply cannot “run out of money”. BBC economics correspondent Andy Verity was more blunt: “When referring to the finances of a government that issues its own currency, saying ‘there is no money left’ is profoundly and embarrassingly wrong. It’s just not how it works.”

But this is the situation that Starmer’s Labour party now finds itself in: they are so desperate to exorcise the ghost of Jeremy Corbyn and fend off allegations of fiscal incompetence that they have turned to reheating the language of a Conservative Chancellor who presided over the physical and financial ruin of the UK. In so many ways, Starmer’s Labour remains trapped in the 2010s – fighting on a battlefield that everyone else has long departed and moved on from.

In their focus on fighting the battles of the last decade, the Labour party seems blind to what is coming down the line. The developed world is going through a series of historical changes: slowing economic growth, falling birth rates and the looming threat of the climate crisis make clear that there will be no return to business as usual. Against this wider backdrop, Starmer’s strategy – to carry on as normal until the trouble blows over – looks more naive with every passing day.

I recently came across a letter Thomas Edison wrote to Henry Ford in 1912 against the backdrop of another era-defining economic transformation. “We’ve stumbled along for a while, trying to run a new civilization in old ways,” he wrote. “But we’ve got to start to make this world over.” That is the level of ambition political parties – my own included – must now rise to if they are to meet the challenges of the coming decade head-on.

The two Westminster parties have shown that they are incapable of doing so. And while I know that voters across the UK are desperate to get the Tories out, I also know that there are now thousands of voters across Scotland who need to see change but recognise that Starmer’s Labour party simply cannot deliver it. People deserve hope and a vision of a better future for themselves and their families in a world that is changing dramatically and irreversibly. My party will seek to give it to them.

Stewart McDonald is SNP MP for Glasgow South

As Keir Starmer and co parrot George Osborne's justification for austerity, it's increasingly clear Labour won't deliver real change – Stewart McDonald

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