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.
