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

But we are no longer living in the world those policies were designed for.

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. Donald Trump’s rise marked the terminal contradiction of neoliberalism: the moment its hegemon turned against it. 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 not by inflation or investor panic, but by a Treasury framework that treats self-imposed constraints as natural laws.

The most telling example? The silent havoc wrought by quantitative tightening (QT). While other G7 central banks

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