SO there we have it. The Labour Party manifesto has been condemned as an economically ruinous plan to bankrupt Britain and take us back to the 1970s. The document has been compared with Labour’s “longest suicide note in history”, the ultra-left manifesto leader Michael Foot produced in 1983. But there are some very notable differences.

For a start Labour was committed to unilateral nuclear disarmament in the 1980s. Tory election posters showed a British soldier with his hands up under the legend “Labour’s defence policy”. The 2017 Labour manifesto commits the party to renewing the Trident nuclear weapons system on a like-for-like basis. The qualifications in last week’s draft manifesto about Labour being “extremely cautious” about using weapons of mass destruction have been dropped. Labour has also sneaked in an explicit commitment to Nato.

Last week, in the leaked manifesto, it appeared as if Labour was still in favour of immigration. The draft talked of how “Britain needs migrants”. That’s all been dropped in favour of a bald statement that “freedom of movement will end when Britain leaves the EU”. The only qualification is that Labour will not “scapegoat” migrants, but there’s no mention of their economic value.

That free movement will end may seem only a statement of fact, but it is significant. Labour is also supposed to be in favour of the European single market (ESM), and membership of the ESM requires countries to adopt free movement. There is now no wriggle room: Labour accepts the Conservative position that Britain must “take back control” of its borders and leave the single market. Labour Brexit means hard Brexit.

On welfare, the draft manifesto suggested Labour would reverse the Tory Government’s freeze on working age benefits, which will take £4 billion out of the pockets of the poor by 2021. This week’s version mentions scrapping the bedroom tax, the rape clause and restoring housing benefit to under 21-year-olds but says nothing about the freeze. Jeremy Corbyn was in some confusion over this and initially appeared to say that the benefit freeze would end, but then contradicted himself. Other Labour figures made clear later that unfreezing of benefits is not a costed commitment.

Now, I am not saying that this undermines Labour’s overall programme, which is genuinely radical and social democratic. It is a document that deserves consideration and offers a genuine alternative to the tired neoliberalism of the Conservatives. Unusually for Labour, its spending commitments are costed in the manifesto and paid for by named increases in personal and corporate taxation. The Institute for Fiscal Studies is not convinced that the tax increases will entirely deliver, since it believes many wealthy people will avoid them. But it is surely unreasonable to insist that a political party abandons its taxation policies because of the risk that the rich will find ways of not paying.

The Conservative complaint that Labour has not included the cost of rail and water nationalisation in its budget is actually beside the point. Awarding a rail franchise to a publicly-owned company doesn’t necessarily cost money up front. Nor do infrastructure projects come out of day-to-day spending. The Conservatives do not include capital spending in their own current spending estimates. Anyway, the one thing we can be absolutely sure about the Tory manifesto when it is published later today is that the true cost of Brexit will not be included.

As the SNP has pointed out, many of the headline measures in the Labour manifesto, like abolishing tuition fees, free school meals, free child care, scrapping hospital parking charges and axing the bedroom tax have already been implemented by the Scottish Government. Nicola Sturgeon has also honoured the nurses pay award, achieved 60 per cent renewable energy targets and retained majority public ownership of water. The SNP says it would favour a publicly-owned franchise for ScotRail.

Unfortunately for Ms Sturgeon, governments don’t get votes for policies they’ve already implemented, however popular. You’re only as good as your last manifesto and it’s no good complaining that Labour has stolen the SNP’s greatest hits. The party will have to dig deep to find some new lines for its manifesto next week. However, Labour has left Ms Sturgeon with some clear red water to work with.

The SNP can now rightly claim to be the only major party in the UK that is committed to unilateral nuclear disarmament, membership of the European Union, free movement of labour, remaining in the single market and reversing the cuts in tax credits. That is somewhat remarkable when you think about it. The Scottish Labour Party passed a resolution at its 2015 conference opposing the renewal of Trident, but Kezia Dugdale made clear yesterday that Labour’s Scottish manifesto will accept the UK position.

Critics may say that it is all very well the SNP having radical policies, but it can do nothing about them because they’re reserved to Westminster. But these are elections to the Westminster Parliament and these are the policies the SNP would like to see there. It would be ludicrous for the Nationalists to issue a manifesto for Holryood in a UK election.

The overall theme will be that Theresa May is imposing a right-wing, Brexit agenda on Scotland and only the SNP is resisting it. Her version of Brexit will undermine the powers of the Scottish Parliament when powers are repatriated from Brussels. The SNP will continue to argue for Scotland to be allowed to remain in the single market after Brexit, and will insist that Scotland needs migrants to keep the economy functioning. Tory refusal to let Holyrood have powers over agriculture and fisheries after Brexit is both a repudiation of the Scotland Act and will undermine farmer’s incomes.

And of course, the SNP is committed to an independence referendum before Britain leaves the EU – to give Scots a choice. This will be fiercely opposed by Ruth Davidson, and Kezia Dugdale has hardened Labour opposition to it, reversing Jeremy Corbyn’s promise “not to stand in the way” of the democratically expressed wishes of the Scottish Parliament. The SNP has been unusually quiet in this pre-manifesto period, as Labour and the Tories have ridden the wave of anti-referendum sentiment. The longer it delays, the more difficult it will be to get back in the race.