LAST week I had the pleasure and privilege of delivering the annual Jimmy Reid Memorial Lecture.

The lecture was delivered in the Bute Hall - the very same room at Glasgow University where, just over four decades ago, Jimmy Reid delivered what I believe was the finest political speech in Scotland’s post-war history.

I’m referring, of course, to his Glasgow University Rectorial Address - delivered during the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders' work-in - where he memorably said that a rat race is for rats.

Jimmy - whom I was fortunate to know and to learn from - was arguing that humans are social beings, and that we only flourish when we value and are valued by those around us and when we are able to make a positive contribution to the society that we live in.

As I was giving my speech last week, Chancellor George Osborne was getting ready to deliver one of his own in the House of Commons the following day.

However, his spending review statement represented, in many ways, the antithesis of what Jimmy Reid argued so passionately for.

There was of course one piece of good news.

Virtually the entire country was calling on George Osborne to perform a u-turn on his ill-thought out tax credit cuts, and thankfully he did just that.

These cuts would have been directed at working people on the lowest incomes - many of them with children to support - and they would have hurt many of the people we most need to help.

No wonder there was such a chorus of opposition to his plans - with even the House of Lords and some Tory backbenchers weighing in.

But it perhaps says something about George Osborne's priorities that the most positive story from his spending review was that he was performing a u-turn.

Although the u-turn was welcome and a great relief, it was in some ways a shame that there was so much focus on it - because that meant that other, much less positive, aspects of the spending review were ignored.

And, make no mistake, taken as a whole, this spending review was bad news for ordinary people and for our public services.

Overall, as a result of the UK Government’s cuts, funding for day to day public services in Scotland will be cut by almost 6% over the next four years.

This represents a cut of over £1.5 billion in real terms in the money that Scotland has to spend.

But other cuts will have equally serious consequences for Scotland.

In particular, the Chancellor confirmed that he’s going to press ahead with £12bn of cuts to the welfare budget – including cuts to housing benefit and the roll out of Universal Credit.

So, he’s essentially moving from targeting the working poor to targeting the even more vulnerable.

I think Peter Kelly, Director of the Poverty Alliance, put it best when he said that these cuts are a matter of choice – not necessity.

Everyone agrees that finances need to be on a sustainable footing - but these cuts go way beyond what is needed and are actually harmful to our wider economy.

We have argued that balancing the current budget – rather than dogmatically pursuing an overall surplus – would mean an extra £150bn for public services across the UK over the next four years.

Debt would still be on a downwards path – but it wouldn’t be cut on the backs of the poor and the vulnerable.

As we’ve seen again and again with this Tory government, the people who lose most are women, people on low incomes and people with disabilities.

And it’s not just the austerity.

Tory plans to scrap the Human Rights Act and curb hard-won worker’s rights with their iniquitous Trade Union Bill are hugely backward steps - and risk causing so much more of the alienation which Jimmy Reid warned so strongly against.

In a couple of weeks, the Scottish Government will be setting out our own spending plans for the coming year. John Swinney's draft budget will be outlined to the Scottish Parliament on 16 December.

This budget will obviously be delivered against the backdrop of these Tory cuts - but we are clear that we have very different priorities for Scotland.

Rather than targeting the vulnerable, the SNP budget will be based around how we can grow the economy faster and more sustainably, how we can support and protect the vital public services that we all rely on, and how we can make Scotland a fairer country and create genuine equality of opportunity.