Labour must exploit the advantage of power — or lose it

The government is listing in the water. Yet it is vital not just that it stays afloat, but it succeeds. In fairness it is doing many of the right things - the NHS 10-year plan, a clever industrial strategy, raising public investment and getting closer to the EU on defence and security. It also had to raise tax big time, and from whatever source the impact would have been economically depressive.

- Will Hutton

But though the economy is hardly flourishing, the fact real incomes are rising and the stock market is broaching new highs suggest resilience. Even NHS waiting lists are falling. It gets zero credit.

Part of the problem is a self-made incapacity to set a persuasive narrative. It suffers from a barrage of attacks from a British right still in thrall to the intellectual paradigm that authored the disasters that have hit Britain over the past 45 years — monetarism and excessive deindustrialisation, financial deregulation and the financial crash, ill-framed privatisation, austerity, Brexit and indifference to gross inequality. The right has learned nothing. Thatcherism did not save Britain. It laid us low.

But the government does not combatively say this. It prefers to couch its defence in terms of the virtues of stability and pragmatism — apple pie and motherhood

statements it knows will arouse little complaint. But nor do they arouse support. Fire must be fought with fire. What is needed is ideological yeast that allows the public (and a restless Labour party) to understand what it is trying to do and why.

One of the reasons for the success of the Blair government was its willingness to mount such an ideological argument; it advocated a