Fear of facing the future has British politics stuck in the past | Rafael Behr

Hollywood has stopped betting on original ideas. Sequels and remakes dominate the box office. Among this year’s Christmas movie releases are Zootropolis 2 (the first Zootropolis came out in 2016), Avatar: Fire and Ash (third in a series that began in 2009), and Wicked: For Good (part two of the adaptation of a musical that premiered in 2003).

New stories are risky. It is safer to retell old ones. British politics feels similarly afflicted by paralysis of the imagination, intimidated by change, stuck in a narrative loop.

After much pre-publicity, last week finally saw the release of the Rachel Reeves fiscal blockbuster, Budget II: the Quest for More Headroom.

The plot was not very different from 2024’s Budget I: Filling a Black Hole.

Both times the chancellor was under pressure to consolidate public finances without starving state services or breaking an election pledge not to use the Treasury’s biggest revenue-raising levers. Both times she hiked other taxes, clinging to the letter of the manifesto while shredding it in spirit.

Reviews for the sequel were bad, but Labour MPs are happy that action has been taken to alleviate child poverty. Bond markets stayed calm, which the Treasury chalks up as a win.

The Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, denounced Reeves for presenting “a budget for Benefits Street, paid for by working people”. No marks for originality there. Benefits Street was a documentary that aired in 2014. The charge that social spending siphons cash from dutiful taxpayers to scrounging layabouts has been in the Tory repertoire for generations.

As Badenoch’s leadership has faltered, she has become ever more reliant on her party’s rhetorical back catalogue. In the early months, she toyed with novel arguments, trying to make Conservatism relevant to the 2020s. There was an elaborate critique of modern liberalism having been “hacked” by authoritarian leftists. There was a theory of economic decline caused by woke civil servants and a glut of human resources managers.

Those weird diagnoses, mostly convoluted restatements of small-state Conservative orthodoxy, didn’t catch on. Badenoch came under growing pressure to say something that her shrinking base could cheer (or even understand). So she kept it simple and ran repeats of classic Tory favourites: cut taxes, welfare and immigration; build a bonfire of red tape; down with Europeans and their meddlesome human rights; all hail Mrs Thatcher, the last truly Conservative prime minister.

In the marketplace of lazy political sequels, Badenoch can’t compete with Nigel Farage. The Reform UK leader is always on screen, plugging the umpteenth iteration of his anti-foreigner franchise. The script for his next general election campaign is already written. Brexit II: Take Maximum Control.

The opposition would find it harder to repackage and sell the past in this way if Labour had a governing agenda that described the future in compelling terms. But Keir Starmer came to office light on policy, with a campaign strategy cribbed from a 1997 Tony Blair playbook which itself had been drafted in reaction to Labour’s traumatic defeat in 1992. For want of the courage to win a difficult argument over taxes, Starmer and his shadow chancellor bound themselves with pledges best suited to help Neil Kinnock beat John Major in a hypothetical rerun of an election 32 years previously.

In opposition, Reeves had attempted some renewal of centre-left economic doctrine. She called it “securonomics”. The argument was that markets could no longer be relied on to drive prosperity. That era was over. In the new volatile times, the state could facilitate wealth creation by underwriting economic security at national and individual level – promoting social protection, restoring labour rights and funding infrastructure investment.

If you hold Reeves’s budgets up to the light at a favourable angle, you can still see the outline of that idea. If the money now being spent does somehow generate collective wellbeing in excess of all current forecasts, the chancellor will be vindicated.

But per-capita disposable incomes are set to rise by just 0.5% per year over the rest of the parliament. There is no secret growth-stimulating sauce. Without one, “securonomics” is reduced to an exercise in buying time with concessions to restive Labour MPs and hoping to avoid economic accidents.

The Starmer-Reeves project is a big bet on national renewal derived from business investment that will be attracted to Britain by political and economic stability. Two flaws stand out. First, the government doesn’t look stable. Second, domestic conditions are vulnerable to external shocks in a turbulent world. With Donald Trump in the White House, some kind of crisis looks probable.

Starmer spends enough time jetting around the globe in response to international volatility to be aware of the problem. In a foreign policy speech on Monday at the Lady Mayor’s Banquet in London, the prime minister offered a rare window on to his geopolitical perspective. He identified the US, the EU and China as “three global giants … all interacting with each other” and predicted that Britain’s future “will be determined by how we navigate this dynamic”.

He set out his navigational principles. Britain should build alliances and do unilateral deals. The national interest is best secured through engagement with “like-minded nations” on the basis of “democracy, freedom, the rule of law”, but that shouldn’t prevent deeper business links with China. Apparently there is no contradiction there. Some kind of firewall will prevent commercial entanglement compromising national security.

Starmer dismisses any notion of a strategic choice between Europe and the US. He doesn’t expect that Washington and Brussels will make incompatible claims on Britain’s allegiance in matters of trade or security. (They surely will.) It is unclear how this policy of equidistance sits with the Trump administration’s indulgence of Kremlin positions on Ukraine.

Maybe the US constitution will withstand assault by Maga authoritarianism and a reliable transatlantic partnership can be restored. Maybe the model of rules-based, globalised free trade that suited Britain’s economy isn’t lost for ever. Just maybe. But also maybe the fall of American democracy is a looming geopolitical shock equivalent in scale to the collapse of the USSR.

It would be reassuring to think the prime minister is measuring that risk. It feels likelier he is just hoping bad things won’t happen. In that respect, Starmer’s foreign policy and Reeves’s budgets do form a doctrine of sorts. They are as one in claiming to deal with the world as it is, while their actions plead in vain for restoration of the world as it once was.

• Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist