Will Rachel Reeves walk the walk on going for growth?

On the face of it, the Chancellor’s big growth speech tomorrow could be one of this government’s most significant interventions yet. If Rachel Reeves is serious about starting the building process for a third runway at Heathrow – she is expected to endorse the idea formally tomorrow – she will be single-handedly overturning more than a decade of Nimby consensus under the Tories that such projects simply were politically impossible to carry out.

The same goes for her pledge to finally get some homes built, and to ‘take on regulators, planning processes and opposition’ to the growth consensus. These also seemed like an impossible task for the governments that came before her.

But here’s the catch: this is not the government’s first speech about growing the economy (see last October). It’s not the first promise for change (see the ‘Plan for Change’ speech last December). Nor is it anywhere near the first attempt to pivot towards a more positive narrative (you can go back to August last year, and the Prime Minister’s ‘fixing the foundations’ speech for that one).