The British are big fans of puzzles. The crossword was devised by an English journalist. One of our most successful cultural exports is the murder mystery blockbuster series; millions of people watch Poirot or Inspector Barnaby or other characters solve difficult mysteries with a flawless bow every evening, traveling from Lagos to Lahore. However, our curiosity about the most intriguing and frustrating national conundrum of all time—British stagnation—has vanished.

With rising gasoline prices, immigration tensions, and high grocery prices, Keir Starmer is promising to address "the rot set deep in the heart of the foundations of our country" as we brace for another harsh winter. However, there seems to be an unusually dramatic quality to his voice. It appears as though our new boss is more focused on.

Whereas the Johnson government was often mocked for its prosecco optimism – all cheap foam and no substance – Starmerism is turning out to be the opposite, concealing its lack of ideas under torrents of pessimism. In his speech this week, Keir Starmer will claim that 14 years of Tories rule have left a “social black hole” as well as an “economic black hole”, and that things are “worse than we ever imagined”. 

The Conservatives are intent on savagely mocking the PM for his melancholy given that the economy is showing new signs of life. But they miss the big picture. GDP growth is by the by. As long as wages remain flat, and innovation fitful, the country will remain in a rut. Which is why the PM is determined to hammer home the idea that it is the Tories, not Labour, who have blown up the country.

The PM must calm down, stop fixating on “the narrative” and reopen the stagnation “cold case” file that has been mouldering in the Whitehall basement since the Brexit wars. 

As we have neglected it over the years, the stagnation puzzle has grown more fiendish and intriguing. It is, quite literally, a mystery wrapped in an enigma: on the one hand, we have fallen behind peers in our productivity due to a knot of eccentrically British problems – from a phenomenon of flailing, Machiavellian, “David Brent” corporate managers to the chronic inability of promising companies to fully scale. On top of this, Western progress is grinding to a collective halt, as the golden era of innovation, which brought us everything from anaesthetics to the kitchen fridge, peters out. Even hubris in the world of bits is fading; Moore’s Law – the golden standard of doubling the components of a semiconductor chip every two years – has crumbled. Silicon Valley is starting to whisper that the AI dream may have been botched, with techies unschooled in neuroscience rushing to build machines based on an absurdly simplistic view of human intelligence.

All this presents a mind-boggling challenge for any new government. For a mediocre one like Labour, it is an impossible nightmare. Number 10 is betting the farm on a house building spree. But while loosening planning restrictions may slightly boost productivity, making it easier for universities to build science labs and Millennials to slog it out with banking jobs in London, it is no panacea.

Sadly, that seems to be the gist of Labour’s grand vision. When it comes to the stagnation mystery’s esoteric sub-plots, such as Britain’s management car crash and the slowness of firms to take up new tech, it only regurgitates lines spoon-fed by the Blob. Blinded by its obsession with forging a closer relationship with the EU, Labour appears oblivious to the potential of divergence from regulations in the life sciences. Its views on AI are inane and it appears to have shrunk its pot for new projects.

Where Labour is more strident, it completely misses the point. The new science and technology minister Patrick Vallance is keen to boost funding for basic science. Yet “breakthroughs” are often born of retrospective bids to explain innovations produced by tinkering entrepreneurs. Thermodynamics came 100 years after the steam engine. Germ theory did not emerge until almost a century after the first (smallpox) vaccine. It would make more sense for Britain to focus on why innovators are not fulfilling their potential.

The hardest thing to forgive about Labour is that it ought to be better placed than the Right tackle this very conundrum. But after 14 years of “thinking time” in opposition, it has nothing to say. This is ridiculous because the answers are right under their noses. After several years of trial and error, we know that R&D tax credits are a waste of time, but helping startups to land consulting contracts, including with the state, can help them to scale through sweat equity, rather than ceding large chunks of their firm to foreign investors. Yet Labour is leaving the current broken regime intact.

We also know that part of the answer to Britain’s management woes is likely to be found in a new form of corporate capitalism, one which keenly incentivises innovational risk-taking over short-termism or office politics. Of course, it’s ultimately up to businesses whether they take a longer-term view over hitting quarterly and yearly targets. But the Government can make an eloquent and detailed case for it, as it has previously with both shareholder and stakeholder capitalism.

It is also well-established that innovation has collapsed in part because in the mid-1990s, the West decisively shifted from Thatcher-Reagan free market capitalism to monopoly Blob capitalism – not only due to the rise of “too big to fail” banks amid financial deregulation, but more importantly the ushering in of a new liberal order of intellectual property protectionism, aided by the WTO.

That big business can make billions merely by collecting the rent on existing intellectual and financial assets goes a long way towards explaining why some cannot be bothered with innovation. For all its sanctimony about sensible multilateral solutions to problems like immigration, apparently the urgent need to work with other governments, including in the US, to reverse this catastrophe has not occurred to Labour.

Milton Friedman once said: “When … crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” The strange thing is that there are plenty of ideas that Starmer could run with to solve the riddle of British decline, and is choosing not to. Instead he seems capable only of sticking-plaster solutions and spin. What a tragedy for the country.