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If you want an economy to grow faster you loosen fiscal and monetary policies. That means lower taxes and/or higher public spending, and lower interest rates.

And it means trying to boost what John Maynard Keynes dubbed “animal spirits”, a sense of optimism about the future that encourages people to invest more and spend more.

Keir Starmer seems to be trying to do the opposite. He has put growth at the top of his agenda, and has billed his visits to Berlin and Paris this week as part of a drive to do that. But his speech on Tuesday, saying that the Budget in October was “going to be painful”, seemed calculated to have the reverse effect.

Monetary policy is of course outside the Government’s remit, as the Bank of England sets interest rates independently, but higher taxes – which Starmer hinted at more heavily than ever during his speech – imply a tighter fiscal policy.

As for boosting confidence about the future, Starmer seemed to be going out of his way to undermine it instead. As Andrew Fisher commented in these pages this week, “Keir Starmer is determined to make us miserable”.

This is all the more puzzling because, viewed objectively, the state of both the UK economy and our public finances is not too bad. The Bank of England has recently revised its growth forecast sharply upwards, to 1.25 per cent this year.

That may not sound great, but it is way higher than the projections of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) and would put us third in the G7 pack, behind only the US and Canada.

With the consumer price index at 2.2 per cent, the UK’s inflation figure is actually the lowest in the G7 at the moment, though that may not last. Earlier this month the Office for National Statistics revised its estimate for the size of the UK economy last year upwards by 0.5 per cent. The UK national........

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