The chancellor has approached this week's spending review like a hesitant bather edging into freezing water, endeavoring to lessen the unpleasantness through incremental exposure.
The chancellor began tackling the problem of insufficient funds near the end of the summer months. Initially, she declined to support previous assertions that tax rises in the prior year's budget would be the ultimate ones.
Subsequently, earlier this month, she took a more significant stride into the freezing waters. Her address committed to "do what is necessary" to finance public services and keep debt expenses down.
In just 10 days, the exchequer had retracted the hint. The election promise was upheld ultimately. Similar to any icy-water swimmer understands, this cancelled immersion and trembling retreat is the least effective of all methods. No tactic extends the discomfort like hesitation.
It can be difficult to be decisive when deciding between degrees of self-inflicted harm.
Optimism has not been a successful approach for the administration. Fundamental of Keir Starmer's general election campaign was the futile hope of by some means satisfying citizens' demand for improved state services without overturning significant amounts of Conservative reductions in taxation.
Never has both Starmer or Reeves effectively communicated a sense of collective goal to explain all this hardship. Partly that is a problem of charisma. Starmer and Reeves are remarkably alike in their poor communication skills, awkward and reticent in a way that pushes listeners back instead of attracting them in.
Similarly to electoral expectations to fund government services has pushed the finance ministry to admit that levies must increase, the commercial requirement of increasing growth makes it ever harder to ignore the expense of detachment from the European single market.
Ministers spent a period experimenting in the initial phase of improved relations with the European Union: suggestions to end import controls on agricultural goods; a student movement initiative. Vision went a bit deeper on energy, military and protection collaboration, but nothing of substance has yet been finalized.
In the absence definite guidance and momentum from Downing Street, discussions are stalled. The European Commission says single-market privileges are obtained with financial input to the European funds. Government representatives are aware that's the agreement. That doesn't make them eager for a visible argument and political opponents shouting betrayal over any cost ends up being agreed.
Financial circumstances has triggered some adjustment in Labour's tone on the EU relationship. Reeves has commenced naming EU withdrawal alongside the Covid pandemic as a factor of financial harm that the Treasury is toiling to address. Cabinet members have followed suit, although they deliberately attribute the fault to "a bad Brexit deal" or "the exit process", never just "withdrawal".
The problem of Britain's future relationship with the European Union can't be simplified to procedural changes and customs systems when the global political landscape is in significant transformation. In light of everything that has occurred since 2016, it feels reasonable still to be raising the big question: were the UK's priorities promoted by departing the European Union?
These constitute cold, uncomfortable realities about Britain's situation in turbulent world affairs. It is understandable that the prime minister and the chancellor recoil from the challenge. It would take them beyond their capabilities, into trends that they cannot resist. So rather they continue apprehensively walking the coastline, hoping that maybe soon the tide will turn.
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