The Prime Minister is in Liverpool today, outlining plans for green investment. Nearly £22billion is pledged for projects to capture and store carbon emissions from energy, industry and hydrogen production. This includes funding for two ‘carbon capture clusters’ on Merseyside and Teesside over the next 25 years. Ministers hope this will create new jobs, attract investment and hit climate goals.

Keir Starmer’s speech was an unusually personal one. Speaking at a glass manufacturing factory, he began by offering up his usual line about being ‘the son of a toolmaker’ but then elaborated saying ‘that matters to me, because until I went off to college, I didn’t even know any working environment other than a factory.’ He then spoke of his early legal career, challenging the Major government’s pit closures on behalf of miners’ families. Such a reference might seem odd, given today’s focus on green jobs. But for Starmer, there is a thread which connects his work then and his policies now.

Deindustrialisation, he said, meant ‘we lost jobs, we lost communities, we lost a way of life and we also I think lost dignity.’ Too often, subsequent governments have since patronised those who lost their employment in the 1970s and 1980s, seeing ‘Industrial communities as a charity case rather than a source of growth to be unlocked.’ His words about the dignity of work were a welcome contrast to the chirpy wonkishness of Ed Miliband, grounding Labour’s plans for a new industrial strategy in the politics of place and patriotism. In perhaps the best extract he argued thus:

We are the first industrial nation. That’s who we are as a country. It’s our story. A source of pride that this country, our country, communities like here, changed the world. And that what is made here matters. You can’t take that away from people without a plan to replace it. It’s like losing a part of yourself, a missing limb, an open wound, a heart ripped out of the nation.

He acknowledged the impossibility of turning back the clock on change – with a quick joke at the Tories’ expense. ‘You don’t ask for a onrushing tide to be stopped – we saw enough of that in Birmingham this week.’ But in the place of old jobs must come new prospects to ‘relight the fires of renewal’. In an echo of George Osborne’s old arguments, he declared that Britain must win the ‘global race’ for green jobs – pioneering new technology to sell to the rest of the world. When asked by the media about the cost of carbon capture, he then switched to Gordon Brown, declaring that ‘invest or decline’ is the ‘new political divide’ in Britain today.

It was clever politics and a concerted effort to humanise the government’s somewhat technocratic talk of a new industrial strategy. Yet while today’s speech showed some of the Prime Minister’s positives, they also highlighted his shortcomings too. He trumpeted the importance of private sector investment, declaring that:

Anybody who’s spoken to an investor in the last five or ten years and asked what has put you off investing in Britain, you will have had the same answer as I gave repeatedly before the election. It’s the instability, it’s the chaos, it’s the ever changing minister behind the desk. There was no long term strategy.

Of course, since the election, business confidence has plummeted, amid suggestions that ministers’ downbeat statements on the economy risk becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Starmer can promise to keep his ministers behind their desks – but that alone will not bring money into UK plc. More revealing still were his claims that ‘only by stabilising the economy can we attract the investment that we need’ and that there is ‘nothing worse for investors than chaos.’ Yet it is precisely the dynamism of growth that the UK needs, rather than an ossified technocracy of managed decline.

Few long for a return of the Tory psychodramas of recent years. But the risk for Keir Starmer and his team is that carbon capture proves to be another long, slow, expensive disappointment in Britain’s history of postwar economic planning. Today’s attempt to sell carbon capture was a good start but much more needs to be done to demonstrate that he and his ministers understand what it will take to lead the next industrial revolution.