As the nights begin to draw in, the brief euphoria of 5 July increasingly feels like something that happened in a lost time of sunny innocence. Today, amid deep dismay, the House of Commons approved the government’s ill-conceived and dangerous plan to withdraw the winter fuel allowance from most pensioners in England and Wales.
Rachel Reeves has reportedly given ministers and civil servants until Friday to draw up departmental savings. In some parts of Keir Starmer’s administration, meanwhile, minds are at least partly focused on interesting and exciting policies – but the Treasury is spreading a familiar sense of fear and foreboding.
What this highlights is simple enough: that there are two strands of this government. One is recognisably left-of-centre, and is personified by a handful of key cabinet ministers: Angela Rayner, Ed Miliband, the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, and Louise Haigh, who is in charge of the transport brief.
This grouping’s priorities are manifested in such policies as improving people’s rights at work, creating a new, publicly owned energy company and gradually renationalising the railways and reregulating local buses in England: all well-intentioned and avowedly social-democratic proposals that serve as instant reminders that the Tories are no longer in charge.
The other key Labour tendency, however, has a rather different mindset – and given that its representatives include the prime minister and the chancellor, it is much more powerful. In their own way, Reeves and Starmer are as stereotypically Labour as their more left-leaning colleagues, but they are statist technocrats rather than merchants of social change: their shared quest, it seems, is to put the government machine back in working order and cling on to its orthodoxies in the........