'Pennies don't fall from heaven," Margaret Thatcher once told us. "They have to be earned here on Earth." No one would have remembered the Good Samaritan if he'd only had good intentions, she averred. "He had money as well." The third of this vile economic triptych was this one: "There can be no liberty unless there is economic liberty." These three phrases alone defined Mrs Thatcher's philosophy that only people with money were of any worth. In her Britain, there could be no room for weak values such as compassion, sharing, kindness and helping the poor. Money, and nothing else, mattered and thus the pursuit of it also defined the 1980s and the 1990s.

Inevitably, it would fail, as any belief must that is based on such an shallow interpretation of why we exist. The greed, avarice and dishonesty at the root of the western banking system were only allowed to flourish because they had been sanctified by Thatcherism and her false credo. It's just a shame that after the system imploded the worst of the money-changers are still among us while a Tory-led administration punishes the weakest in society.

"Scotland cannot be the only 'something for nothing' country in the world." Mrs Thatcher would have been proud of that one as well. That this was, instead, espoused by the leader of the Scottish Labour party would have tickled the Iron Lady right down to her blue painted toenails. Quite why Johann Lamont allowed her speech writer to include such crass sophistry as this can only be guessed at.

Ms Lamont's use of the phrase "something for nothing", as well as coming straight from the grimoire of Margaret Thatcher is, at best, misleading, at worst, downright false. She used it in her flagship address last week in which she signalled that Labour would turn away from its traditional support for universal free public services. It's difficult to assess which body of Labour supporters will be most insulted and alienated. There are hundreds of thousands of workers in this country who have been paying their national insurance contributions and taxes for decades. These people have already seen one of their own, Gordon Brown, betray them by raiding their pensions. That he did this by fornicating all the while with bankers simply rubbed salt in the wounds. Now they are having to stomach a Scottish Labour leader, apparently sound in mind and body, telling them that the benefit package for which they have paid many times over is "something for nothing". Free bus passes in their old age; free personal care in their dotage; and free university tuition for their children who will similarly make a lifetime of contributions to the state is the least to which they are entitled.

It is unlikely that we will ever witness Ms Lamont metamorphosing into a tartan Thatcher. A joint economic group chaired by Cathy Jamieson and including Labour's finance spokesman, Ken Macintosh, will explore how affordable are Scotland's free public services. Scrapping free tuition fees, removing the council tax freeze and charging for prescriptions may be all that Scottish Labour will feel that they can get away with before the 2015 Holyrood election. Nor is Ms Lamont the first senior Scottish Labour politician to question the cost of free personal care. When Susan Deacon was health minister in the first Holyrood administration, she advised Henry McLeish that such a policy would be difficult to fund.

The most disturbing aspect of this shift in Scottish Labour thinking is that it acquiesces lazily to the notion that only cuts to public services can help us navigate our way through a double-dip recession. This simply highlights the utter poverty of imagination and intellect that characterises Labour's approach to curing the ills of Scottish society since the war. The wretchedly named party of the people has wilfully neglected to address, in any meaningful way, the source of the most ruinous cost to our public purse: child poverty. Instead of loftily brandishing the Christie commission report and its warnings about harsh decisions having to be made on public spending it should be seeking to reverse decades of inertia during which the incidence of child poverty in the UK, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, has risen to a level higher than most of the world's other rich countries. This costs the country around £25bn annually.

As the incidence of urban multi-deprivation in some parts of Scotland is the worst in the UK, it is reasonable to conclude that Scotland's share of that £25bn will be disproportionate. The grim outlook for Britain's growth prospects may see Holyrood's grant being slashed way beyond what was initially expected by 2017. The care bill will have to rise to cope with the increase in people living to great old age. If we could save even 5% of the Scots children who are annually choked by deprivation, the economies would allow us to meet our care costs.

Lamont's decision to lean towards the right was described as a brave one, but there was nothing brave about it. Real courage would have been to establish a commission into the causes of child poverty and then to commit her party to act on the findings. Such a commission might also do something that no Scottish education minister has ever done: develop a radical policy to improve our failing urban comprehensive schools. It would also quantify exactly how much our continuing neglect of poor children costs Scotland. I predict that the annual bill will swamp all the free care costs that are so exercising Ms Lamont. If the SNP pledged to establish such a commission and make it a cornerstone of an independent Scotland, then they will see me yet wearing a kilt and brandishing a Saltire on the day of the independence referendum.

In the meantime, you will see unicorns grazing outside John Smith House before you witness a Scottish Labour leader acting for the poor.