Rachel Reeves is Gordon Brown in a dress The Chancellor's ambition is limited to the past

When we think of student politics, we tend to imagine long-haired radicals full of righteous indignation, wearing Che Guevara t-shirts and reading (or perhaps pretending to read) Karl Marx. Not so for the young Rachel Reeves, who in the heady days of Cool Britannia decorated her student room with a framed picture of Gordon Brown. The New Labour chancellor had just committed to replicating the spending plans of the outgoing Conservative chancellor Kenneth Clarke. The politics of the radical icons, and the big, totalising ideas, didn’t cut it for the young Reeves. Instead, she over-identified with the gradualism and moderation of the incumbent.

If we were being charitable, we could put Reeves’s early Brownite fandom down to a precocious awareness of the limits of state power in a modern, globalised market economy. While most young Leftists take years to realise that there aren’t levers labelled “socialism” and “equity” hidden in the corridors of power, and that the problem isn’t simply that nefarious politicians are refusing to pull them, Reeves realised early on that politics required compromise. Brown was a master of trade-offs; his chancellorship was defined more by continuity than by rupture. He combined a glum acceptance of narrow political possibilities with smug detachment, wonkish obsessions, and an intensely awkward media persona. Reeves has built on his example.

More importantly, though, Reeves’s teen-worship reveals the limits of her ambition. Hers is less a politics of utopias or grand narratives, but rather one of managerialism, and deep, lifelong integration with the strange social club of professionalised Labour politics. Like Brown, she has no intention of altering the relationship between state and market, or between labour and capital, in any substantive way. Instead, her Platonic ideal is a return to the easy politics of Britain in the post-Cold War years, buoyed by a booming global economy. That was before the 2008 crash and all the morbid symptoms of secular stagnation that developed after — including the populisms of the Left and Right, and the intensifying culture wars. In Reeves’s analysis, what Britain needs is not so much a new growth model, but simply a return to growth per se. This would be enough to protect the sensible, centre-left old guard from oblivion.

But in thinking this way, Reeves and Keir Starmer are beginning to resemble an anachronistic ancien régime, hopelessly out of step with the times. The year is 2025, not 1997. Donald Trump has just won re-election with an enormous personal mandate for mass deportations, tariffs, and “drill, baby, drill!”. And all the energy is with the populist Right. The mushy centre cannot hold — and Labour’s policies, its aura, and its diction all seem strikingly discordant with the zeitgeist. Farage, Trump, Musk et al. seem imbued with a Hegelian “World-Spirit”, whereas everything Labour does appears as old-fashioned, robotic, and laboured. Over the weekend, Reeves admitted Britain could learn from Trump’s “positivity” — but perhaps it needs to do more than just that.

The problem isn’t limited to Labour. The whole of Europe has become a seedbed of national populism; an incubator for the politics of Giorgia Meloni, Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen and the AfD. It is no longer a continent of expansionary, liberal optimism, but instead resembles a declining, dysfunctional terrain that is falling far behind the true, bifurcated hegemons facing off in Washington and Beijing. In such a world, caught in the middle of a new Cold War, how can Labour possibly survive?

Like a blindfolded child struggling to hit a piñata, Reeves scrambles for a solution to Britain’s flatlining jobs market, spiking bond yields, and “fiscal headroom”, which is squeezed between her own fiscal rules and the whims of gilt traders. Bill Clinton’s strategist once said that if he was reincarnated he’d like to come back as a bond trader, so great was the power they wielded over the world’s governments. Reeves might sympathise with such a fancy. Even when she sticks to her own mildly social-democratic, tax-and-spend Budget, the faceless entities of international sovereign debt markets throw a spectacular hissy fit, casting doubt on her growth forecasts, edging up the price of borrowing, and forcing her to keep Britain stuck in a low-investment, low-productivity doom loop.

There have been whispers that Labour-aligned groups are seeking the advice of Dominic Cummings and his esoteric, very online pro-growth networks. Yet if this is true, the maverick’s influence is yet to be felt. When it comes to the issue of planning regulation, the Government has displayed an almost incomprehensible timidity. It may have green-lighted a handful of projects, but a comprehensive reform of planning — especially one that confronts the vetocracy — still looks highly unlikely. The final legislation will probably fall victim to the Government’s penchant for eternal reviews, consultations and inquiries. The future expansion of Heathrow is a welcome development, but after Reeves’s begging-bowl trip to China, and her half-hearted trip to a Davos snoozefest, during which her event was apparently streamed online by fewer than 40 people, it smacks of desperation.

In the meantime, the Left has been condemned to near-total irrelevance. Gaza has become an all-consuming passion for those on the Left of Labour, dominating their organising efforts. Where there might have been an effective fifth column against Reeves’ more conservative instincts, there is the pro-Palestine movement. Popular discontent with the removal of the winter fuel allowance has been a boon to Reform, which has increasingly begun to triangulate towards the more statist instincts of the electorate by promising a restoration of the pensioners’ benefit, the removal of the two-child benefit cap, and the renationalisation of the steel industry and Thames Water. What’s more, the Left has continued down the pathway of sub-cultural estrangement from the national mean, ritually purifying their ranks of anyone who strays from their militant line on gender, race relations, policing, geopolitics and migration. When they do venture into debates about the political economy, it’s only to fight yesterday’s war. They criticise Labour’s supposed return to “austerity” even after a Budget that raised taxes by £40 billion and oversaw the largest increases in borrowing and spending for decades.

Much of that money will be spent on the green transition, which is now in full swing. Reeves awarded Ed Miliband’s Energy Department the biggest increase in spending of any Whitehall body. There will be no new oil and gas licences; Grangemouth refinery will close; and the steel and chemicals industries will be decimated. And yet the hundreds of thousands of Net Zero jobs this will create will not be in Britain. Instead, Britain will import turbines, cables and solar technologies, primarily from Denmark and China, which never embraced the ideology of monetarist deindustrialisation.

This isn’t the “Green Industrial Revolution” the Left once heralded as a catalyst for growth and a jobs renaissance. How could it be when the most efficient way to cut our emissions is to export them elsewhere? To do otherwise would require an unimaginable level of investment in Britain — and already, the markets have deemed the UK to be pushing against the limits of fiscal probity. A choice has to be made between a robust domestic supply chain for the green revolution, or the catch-up maintenance of crumbling roads, schools and hospitals.

The Chancellor pines for a return to a lost, Brownite norm, but she still cannot answer Lenin’s “who, whom” injunction — Who is your politics for? This is the trouble when you have no grounding in ideology: you never establish whose side you are on — a discovery that remains with you even as your politics grows more nuanced. Reeves never developed a deep political hinterland. She has no politics. And that distances her from the spirit of the age. While today’s populist insurgents combine a robust cultural supremacism and an economic nationalism that suits the post-Covid, deglobalising, decoupling era, the centrist incumbents cling to the safety of convention, sensibilism, and a long-gone, post-political era of liberal consensus. The vibe shifted against them long ago.

There is still potential for a syncretic politics of the Left that combines the energies of the new leviathans of the age — a protective, interventionist, and redistributive state — with an embrace of tech-accelerationism, productivism, and a pro-growth policy agenda. This could loosely resemble a kind of East Asian developmentalism, adapted for an advanced, post-industrial economy plagued by intense regional inequalities. But the Left isn’t there yet. They’re still arguing with brick walls. The progressives have lost hope in the future; they’ve become nostalgic regressives, far too wedded to the old ways.

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