SHADOW chancellor Anneliese Dodds is starting to put in place Labour’s economic vision for the election in 2024. 

Her speech at the Labour Connected event, held in lieu of the party’s annual conference, underlined her opposition to austerity and support for jobs-friendly environmental investment. 

And she took the Tory government to task for the extraordinary waste of public money and cronyism that has seen millions of pounds go to Conservative donors for testing kits that were unsafe, and outsourced contracts fail to deliver. 

This is surely a rich seam to mine over the next few years.

It was a solid, if short, speech that laid some of the economic groundwork Labour will need to build on in the years ahead. 

There’s a broad consensus across the party and the wider labour movement on opposing Tory austerity cuts. 

That fight was won in the party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, and across the country as a whole spending cuts are now so unpopular that the Tories have to keep insisting that they, too, will not be returning to austerity. 

There’s no room for complacency. The Tories are divided on how they exit from the first phase of the pandemic crisis, with Boris Johnson and No 10 — keeping a close eye on their newly acquired “Red Wall” seats — pushing against spending cuts even as the Treasury insists on trying to shrink the deficit as quickly as possible. 

It is essential that the Labour Party and the broader movement are as one in opposing cuts, and so better able to exploit those Tory divisions. 

Some of the spin around Dodds’s speech risked confusing this message.

And we will need clearer future commitments on improving public services. Fundamentally, that means more spending. 

Health, social care and education all need big cash increases in the next few years. 

It would be wise for Labour to put in place the framework for how it is going to raise the funds, just as former shadow chancellor John McDonnell did successfully before the 2017 election. 

Keir Starmer’s leadership election pledges, including higher taxes on the rich, are a good starting point.

But as the rise in infections and local lockdowns make clear, we will not be returning to the pre-Covid world any time soon — even with a vaccine, our immunity to the virus may be limited. 

Covid-19 has made the environmental collapse an unavoidable fact of everyone’s life. 

The number of epidemics globally is increasing as a direct result of the pressure the economy puts on the environment, with intensive farming a particularly efficient incubator for new diseases. 

Early evidence suggests that climate change will increase epidemics, too, as existing ecosystems are disturbed. 

The political debates from here onwards are going to centre on how we deal with this collapse. 

Labour’s support for the Green New Deal, recently underlined by shadow business secretary Ed Miliband, is important, but we need more than a commitment to rapid decarbonisation. 

We also need to lay out how our plans will make sure the grave costs of the environmental crisis, from increased flooding to food shortages, are placed on the broadest shoulders. 

We need a plan for adaptation to a changing world that builds in security and fairness.

It is here that the shadow chancellor has raised some interesting ideas. 

Labour’s proposals for reforming the furlough scheme include government support for reduced time working — an excellent idea, recently proposed by the Autonomy think tank, and similar to what the German government now offers. 

This would allow businesses to adjust to the new way of working, while — critically — making sure workers are properly protected. 

We know industries and sectors are going to have to change in response to Covid-19, from aviation to tourism. 

So we should start to plan for how that can happen — and look to reduce working time overall.

And we know that some work is better for the environment than others. The pandemic has brought home the extraordinary dependency we all have on work that is often underpaid and undervalued, from cleaning to care work. 

But caring for the sick and the elderly, or keeping our streets and our workplaces clean, are labour-intensive jobs with minimal environmental impacts. 

Dodds has suggested, building on the work of the Women’s Budget Group, that any green recovery shouldn’t just focus on high-tech jobs in renewables, but look to build up and support work across the whole economy. 

Spending on care is particularly jobs-rich, creating more jobs per pound spent than construction or many other sectors. 

The Women’s Budget Group estimate that a Scandinavian-style care system in the UK would create two million jobs across the country. 

These are still early days in the parliament, for Labour under its new leadership — and in this pandemic.

The role of shadow chancellor is a thankless task, and one made particularly difficult by Covid-19, which has seen Rishi Sunak become one of the most popular politicians in the country on the back of some big spending. 

If Labour is to be in a position to win in 2024, however, it needs to not only attack the government for its incompetence, and for its cronyism, but to set out a plan for building a fairer country in increasingly difficult circumstances. 

Dodds has indicated some promising future directions. The rest of the movement has to start to fill in the blanks, and fight for a programme and vision that Labour can and must win on.