Growth will be turbo-charged, animal spirits will be unleashed, and foreign investment will flood back into Britain. Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves is promising a Thatcher-style revival of the British economy if Labour wins power. But there’s a problem with the pitch that she will deliver in her keynote Mais lecture on the economy today: a Labour government isn’t going to deliver this promised growth. Reeves is setting herself up for failure.

Labour’s proposals are painfully thin

With at most only a few months left before she takes charge of the Treasury, as she inevitably will, Reeves is making it clear that she expects the UK to return to the 2.5 per cent annual rate of expansion that were normal in the 1980s and 1990s. Growth she promised will be ‘hard-wired’ into the Treasury, ‘so that we can bring together public and private sectors in a national mission, directed at restoring strong economic growth across Britain.’ Labour will seek to bring about a ‘new chapter in Britain’s economic history’, Reeves says, insisting that, just like in 1979, the UK is at an ‘inflection point’ that will mark the start of a new era.

Well, perhaps. The problem is that her actual proposals are painfully thin. She wants to beef up the powers of the Office for Budget Responsibility, so that every Budget proposal is subject to even more scrutiny. And Reeves wants to set up a new ‘growth’ committee within the Treasury, because, er, everyone knows it is the desperate shortage of civil servants sitting around tables at No. 11 Downing Street that has been holding back investment. This strategy doesn’t sound very radical.

In the meantime, Reeves has dropped her plan to spend £28 billion a year on ‘green investments’, which might have actually stimulated expansion. And her colleagues are busily planning measures that, while possibly worthwhile in themselves, are more likely to lower growth than raise it. A ‘right to switch off’ for workers might be good for work-life balance, but there is no point in kidding yourself that it will make businesses more productive.

Reeves’s overblown rhetoric will come back to haunt her. She can promise growth, growth, growth under Labour if she wants. But if it does not arrive, as it likely won’t, she will face tough questions – and have to take the blame if GDP growth struggles to get above 0.1 per cent during her time in office.