Starmer and Reeves need a fresh approach to enact their vision, and I have a plan for that. They’re just channelling the ghosts of governments past
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.
Randeep Ramesh is chief leader writer for the Guardian