Labour needs a fresh approach rather than channelling old ghosts

This summer's “rebuild, rebuild, rebuild” campaign by the government feels less like a policy programme than a seance.

- Randeep Ramesh

Promising renewal, Keir Starmer instead channels the ghosts of governments past. As Karl Marx put it, people make history but not in circumstances of their own choosing; they do so haunted by dead ideas, dressing the future in secondhand costume. Labour wears what was fashionable in 1997 and 2010: Gordon Brown's technocratic reverence for central bank independence and George Osborne's devotion to fiscal rectitude.

The global order that sustained Britain's post-1979 model is cracking. International trade peaked in 2008. The promise of seamless globalisation - of frictionless finance and footloose production - has faded. As the US embraces a form of economic nationalism, Britain - which is dependent on capital inflows, asset bubbles and open markets - faces a historic reckoning. It needs a new economic settlement. It needs imagination. But Starmer and his chancellor Rachel Reeves remain stuck in a paradigm whose time has passed.

Take Reeves's fiscal stance. Despite promises of transformation, departmental budgets will grow more slowly than under the last parliament. This isn't mere prudence; it's the codification of a false scarcity - engineered by a Treasury framework that treats self-imposed constraints as natural laws.