David Willetts is President of the Resolution Foundation.
Both Labour and Conservatives share the objective of raising the growth rate – and it looks very likely that, on Friday, this challenge will fall to a Labour chancellor.
There is no doubting Rachel Reeves’ commitment to doing this. It makes everything else governments want to do so much easier. By contrast a low-growth environment, where Britain has been stuck since the 2008-9 financial crisis, traps us in a miserable zero-sum game in which extra resources for someone come at the expense of less resource for someone else.
That is the backdrop to public disenchantment with politics and a willingness to embrace wild alternatives on the far left or Right. We have a shared interest in getting growth going.
However, raising the growth rate of a mature democracy is very difficult. It involves far more than common sense and stability.
For a start it actually involves higher rates of economic change; under-preforming companies close, and strong ones grow. That rarely happens with a neat geographical equity: instead there are places with the right skills or a relevant history or the right infrastructure or even natural resources – off-shore wind, for example, or access to oil fields well-suited for carbon capture and storage.
Moreover, moving people and investment to the growth opportunities is greatly assisted by clear price signals of higher wages and profits.
Labour may say that they will then make sure that people losing out are protected and that is admirable. But there may be a lag before the proceeds of growth are available to pay for this compensation – and it can be hard to deliver it in a way that does not weaken the signals about the high growth opportunities.
Tony Blair brilliantly combined the economic dynamism of the 1980s with a much greater focus on fairness. But he had the resources to do this because of the hard, sometimes unpleasant work which had already been done. Blair and Bill Clinton thrived after Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. There is not the same inheritance now.
The battle to get economic dynamism and higher growth is hard and unpopular work. It is particularly hard to deliver in a mature democracy richly endowed with interest groups, many of which are organised to try to stop things happening.
The expansion of wind power in the North Sea means a different orientation of the National Grid, bringing electricity not down from the coal-power of the Midlands and the North but East across Suffolk and Essex.
The protests and objections are already under-way. This is the type of political opportunity the Liberal Democrats always seize, regardless of any claims they make at the national level.
Labour say they represent the areas which are pro-growth, and that Tories too can play the Lib Dem game. Some Conservative candidates do indeed find it hard to resist the temptation to campaign against “over-development”.
But if Labour get anything like the number of MPs now being forecast, they will find themselves also representing prosperous areas which would rather the economic growth happened somewhere else please.
On top of all that, the biggest shock many incoming ministers face on arriving in office is the legal constraints on their power.
All their decisions are justiciable – and that includes being assessed by meta-laws which impose general obligations on decision-takers, and which constrain progressives just as much as Conservatives.
Rob Colville and the CPS have warned very powerfully of these constraints.
We had a vivid example at the weekend, with a report that David Pannick believed Labour’s proposed VAT on private school fees would impede the human right to education. Other lawyers have already pushed back against this, and his argument will be tested in the courts. But it is just the start.
Is steering pension funds into British investments inconsistent with the duties of pension trustees? How does the right to property now embodied in the Human Rights Act constrain governments from repeating the New Town of model (buying land at agricultural prices and then awarding themselves planning permission)?
These legal challenges will come from all corners. The real opposition to a Labour Government could well be not the bankers, but the lawyers.
This leads to Sir Keir Starmer’s door. He above all has committed to raise the growth rate. He was also a highly successful lawyer willing take an activist approach. Will he be like Nixon going to China, and use his weight and prestige to do something about it? Or will the lawyers win? It will be one of the most consequential battles Labour will face.