Reading the Labour MP Preet Gill’s latest article for the Daily Telegraph, one momentarily forgets what stage of this government’s life cycle we’re in. Gill’s argument is that the Government needs to cleave more to “Blue Labour” values, as supposedly embodied by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood. Reminder: Keir Starmer was elected to office with a landslide majority only 18 months ago.

Blue Labour is best understood as an attempt to revive a (real or misremembered) “Old Labour” tradition, meaning a Left-wing economic agenda leavened with patriotism, social conservatism, and law-and-order toughness. On paper, that might be an electorally potent combination, an offer that speaks to the largely unrepresented “Left on economics, Right on culture” quadrant where many voters live but few politicians do. Yet like most essays from the Conservative era that argue for a similar position, it doesn’t really point toward any real answer to Labour’s current problems.

It is true that Shabana Mahmood is indisputably the most effective minister in the current government, and yes, Labour would probably fare better if it cleaved more closely to her instincts on immigration. But we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves. Mahmood might have been an effective Justice Secretary, but that was very much grading on a curve. She was in post for less than two years, and her key faults include a “solution” to prison overcrowding, which involved cutting sentences and letting people out. Perhaps if she’d had more time, she’d have delivered the prison-building programme Britain urgently needs.

Beyond that, however, Gill’s paean to “Blue Labour” values reveals its shortcomings. The article is long on airy invocations of the importance of place and the necessity of taking “hard decisions”, but short on saying what those decisions actually are.

The most glaring problem in the article is the void where an economic policy should be. Gill does assert that an industrial strategy means that “regions should have clear specialisms.” It’s a tired recipe for exactly the sort of attempt to dictate Britain’s economic geography that has been tried over and over again, with predictably disastrous consequences, since the Second World War. But at least that gets a mention, which is more than can be said for the single most important issue facing this and any future government: the utterly unsustainable trajectory of Britain’s public spending.

It’s a simple problem to describe, and it’s not new. Government revenue spending — on things like welfare and wages, as opposed to capital investment — is running far, far ahead of the ability of our flatlining economy to pay for it. That meant first more borrowing, leaving us deeply in hock to the bond markets, and now higher taxation, which crushes people’s disposable incomes and chokes the economy further.

The thing that is broken in British politics is that the political space to admit this does not exist; unlike in 2010, the voters simply do not accept that there is any need for more “austerity”. That leaves both Labour and the Conservatives with economic offers that are more or less identical, and neither of which offers any sort of solution. The rival party leading by a large margin in the polls, Reform UK, has made loud noises about cutting government expenditure. But at the same time, Farage’s army is still hesitant about addressing fiscal black holes, which matter to its potential voters, such as the Triple Lock.

Labour backbenchers are so unwilling to face up to this that they blocked Rachel Reeves’s attempt to deliver a paltry £5 billion in welfare savings, and shattered Starmer’s authority in the process. It’s therefore not convincing that a Shabana Mahmood Blue Labour-style leadership bid would be popular enough to take over. Labour MPs would not give Mahmood more rope, and especially not if she tacked Right on immigration and crime. Even if the Labour leadership were more sympathetic to the Blue Labour philosophy, it has yet to prove that it has the answers to the country’s terminal economic decline.

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Henry Hill is Deputy Editor of ConservativeHome.

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