Growth? Growth? Growth?

Where Reeves might stumble, and what the Tories should do in return.

Reservoirs, runways and readies.

Begrudgingly, perhaps, you have to hand it to them. Labour appears to be getting serious about infrastructure and the growth it can deliver. Yesterday's speech from Rachel Reeves centred both the need for growth and the idea that it is often regulation, planning, and NIMBYism holding it back. She seized on ideas – like Heathrow and the OxCam Arc- that had kicked around under the Tories but faded away. Labour, Reeves indicated, was finally going to grasp the nettle and just build stuff.

As we have long seen, however, speeches don't guarantee spades in the ground. The question for Labour now is much like it was for the Tories – do they have a plan to put this into action, and are they prepared to make the most difficult decisions to achieve it? For the Conservatives, there is a different challenge in how to credibly and constructively act as an Opposition around these plans.

For Reeves and Starmer, the first challenge will be holding the line. The reason that these announcements feel almost laughably familiar is because they are. This is the third time a government has endorsed another runway at Heathrow, yet the project remains in abeyance. Many of the other projects mentioned have a similarly lamentable history, ultimately because they have been unable to overcome political opposition. Labour will have to contend with same sort of systemic and democratic issues as the governments that went before them.