LIKE a drowning swimmer clutching at any passing driftwood, the government is touting the increase in gross domestic product as proof its economic policy is working.

Certainly the news was a useful distraction during a week dominated by Keir Starmer’s lurch into Enoch Powell-style anti-migrant rhetoric.

It also draws attention away from today’s other announcement, that NHS waiting lists are rising once more, reversing one of Labour’s few successes to date.

In fact, the increase in GDP, 0.7 per cent for the first quarter of the year, is modest enough. It is just 0.1 per cent ahead of forecasts and actually lower than the 0.9 per cent registered in the same quarter last year, when the Tories were still precariously in charge.

As Unite general secretary Sharon Graham pointed out, this remains well below the targets Keir Starmer has been aiming at.

She points the way to better results in urging “more investment in everything from good-quality green jobs to the public services and local authorities currently being pushed into austerity by cuts. A real recovery must mean that everyday people feel it in their pockets.”

That has not been, to put it mildly, ministerial strategy. Labour has all-but abandoned its green investment plans and is doing nothing to help beleaguered local authorities, several of which teeter on the edge of bankruptcy.

Moreover, it is sucking money out of the economy with its welfare benefit cuts. Its only proactive contribution to economic growth is via a militarist spending boom.

Since this is a sector with an extremely high technical component, hopes of a boom in high-skilled work are likely to prove misplaced, never mind the political and ethical concerns.

Beyond that, Rachel Reeves’s growth drive turns heavily on deregulation, with a drive to free businesses from regulatory constraints which purportedly inhibit investment.

We have of course seen where such a strategy leads. Criminal calamities like the Grenfell fire and outrages like our polluted rivers.

In the end it leads to meltdowns like the 2008 bankers’ crash, the product of New Labour deregulatory zeal in relation to the City in so far as Britain contributed to that global event. 

Like the Bourbon monarchs of France, Reeves has forgotten nothing and learned nothing. She is enslaved to the dogmas of the Treasury, prioritising reducing spending, slashing regulations, strengthening the pound and hoping for the best.

But the storm-clouds are only darkening. A former No 10 aide responsible for economic policy, Nick Williams, has warned that Reeves’s budgetary plans are unsustainable and more tax rises are the only answer.

He says more money is needed to tackle crime, for the military and local government. Others will have a different list of priorities. And he also points out that slashing immigration numbers will impact negatively on tax revenue.

Starmer and Reeves remain in a bind of their own making. They have ruled out increased taxes on high earners, a wealth tax and a rise in corporation tax.

They have still more strongly dismissed calls to relax their “iron-clad” fiscal rules, driven by Treasury debt-reduction priorities.

And radical state-led growth plans do not get a hearing at either No 10 or No 11. So we are back to wing-and-a-prayer trust-the-bosses as a strategy.

In a world of tariff wars, climate crisis and advancing artificial intelligence, that is not a recipe for growth but a recipe for disaster. If the government wants to do better than 0.7 per cent it needs to follow the agenda outlined by Sharon Graham and start climbing out of the economic hole it has spent 10 months digging itself into.