WE will listen, we will learn the lessons. The boilerplate mantras have tripped easily off the tongue of Labour politicians since the catastrophic loss of Caerphilly in the Welsh Senedd by-election last week.

But do they mean it? The evidence is scant. Just this week we learn that ministers are preparing to relax regulations around “short-selling” — a fancy term for gambling by hedge funds, wherein they bet that the shares of a target company are going to fall.

This is an irredeemably useless activity from any social point of view, and Labour’s intention to indulge its practitioners is just another signal of its subordination to the City and neoliberalism in its most grotesque forms.

It speaks to the utter poverty of the government’s political imagination, and to Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s inability to think outside the box of conventional bourgeois economic strategy.

Was that what the thousands of lost Labour voters in Caerphilly were protesting about? Does the government actually imagine they were calling for easier treatment of hedge funds when they defected en masse to Plaid Cymru or Reform? Not even the most obliging Downing Street spin doctor could be persuaded to peddle such a line.

But the news shows how hard it will be to shift the government from its destructive course. Starmer continues to pin all his hopes on economic growth driven by the City. In this he follows every prime minister since the 2008 crash who have all banked the future on a revival of the system that imploded globally then.

And indeed, further liberalisation of rules limiting the activities of the City speculators make another such crash far more likely than a revival of the productive economy. The latest shift exploits Britain’s exit from the European Union to deviate from stricter Brussels rules — not what more than 17 million voted for back in 2016.

Nor is it what Labour Party members seem to want. It is very hard to get excited about the election of Lucy Powell as the party’s deputy leader, on a very small turnout of party members and affiliated trade unionists.

Powell was an uncomplaining member of Starmer’s Cabinet until she was evicted from it in the reshuffle occasioned by Angela Rayner’s resignation. That she represents any form of serious alternative to the disastrous course of the last 15 months is, to say the least, unevidenced.

However, her dismissal by Starmer draped her in the raiment of dissent, whether she willed it or no. She became the channel through which the party’s immense frustrations could flow.

Being free of Cabinet responsibility also gave Powell the latitude to openly dissent from the signature disasters of the government, from the cutting of winter fuel payments to the botched attack on disability benefits and the maintenance of the cruel two-child benefit cap.

Her belated deviation from the Starmer-Reeves agenda does not amount to a strategic course correction by any means, but it signals perhaps a different order of priorities. However dressed up, it was a rebuke to the Prime Minister from his own purged party.

The question remains whether or not Starmer is capable of listening to party members and voters alike. Cocooned as he is in Downing Street with a chief adviser in Morgan McSweeney for whom the answer to each and every problem is “attack the left, shift to the right” it is impossible to be optimistic.

Only serious labour movement pressure will force a change, including a change at the very top of the government. Starmer and McSweeney are leading Labour to still greater defeats in next May’s elections. There is no time to delay.