Labour should be wary of fighting yesterday’s battle over the economy

For a nation yearning for the chance to revert to a pre-Covid world, it might seem a bit jarring to have the leader of the opposition demanding “no return to business as usual” after the pandemic.

Obviously it is meant as a warning to the government not to impose a second age of austerity in Britain in as many decades, but Sir Keir Starmer, oddly, is the one sounding rather severe about the future. It suits his rather serious manner, in truth, just as senseless optimism is the prime minister’s metier, but it is not what Sir Keir is really about. However, what he is really about is a little indistinct.

In a speech on Thursday, Sir Keir will reference four specific limited tests for the Budget in a fortnight’s time: retain the £1,000 a year uplift to universal credit; drop the planned increase in council tax; extend the business rates holiday; and carry on with the reduction in VAT. All are crowd-pleasers, all eminently practical and sensible, all justified by the still fragile state of the economy, and all emblematic of Labour’s “new partnership between an active government and enterprising business”. Some may even be adopted by the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, which will allow Sir Keir to look prescient (and not like “Captain Hindsight”).

So Sir Keir wants no return to austerity and the “failed Conservative ideology” that “weakened the foundations of society”. Funnily enough, neither does Boris Johnson. Mr Johnson has been a relatively free-spending Tory premier and, for good or ill, he is an enthusiast for capitalism and also an instinctive interventionist. No wonder, in a rare moment of political philosophising, he described himself as “basically Brexity Hezza”, referring to Michael Heseltine’s passion for supporting the best of British industry.

Unlike Margaret Thatcher, or even Theresa May, Mr Johnson does not treat public money with much respect – and he has long since abandoned the deficit-cutting orthodoxies of the Cameron-Osborne era. More like his hero Winston Churchill, beyond a few basic and adaptable principles Mr Johnson follows no particular ideology and will exploit any cause, political party or movement as long as it suits his purposes (exempli gratia: Brexit).

Mr Johnson may call himself a Conservative, or even, if the audience would like it, a Thatcherite, but he is in reality a populist, and a talented one at that. It should have come as no surprise that he and Dominic Cummings went through a brief phase of talking about “the people’s government” and “the people’s party”.

This slipperiness leaves Labour and its leader in an awkward place. It is far too easy to fall into the trap of fighting the Conservative Party as you would wish it to be, or as it once was, and Sir Keir seems to be making precisely that strategic error.

Mr Johnson is not going to help Sir Keir out. Even if the prime minister was by nature inclined to implement swingeing cuts in public services and benefits and to hike taxes (and HM Treasury, as ever, certainly is), it would make little economic sense and it would be a major political error.

Mr Johnson will do whatever it takes to win himself the next election, and he won’t be punctilious about the way he does it. Austerity is unlikely to be a theme of this premiership. Labour needs to be careful not to fight the last war.