It is always reassuring to be attacked by the Daily Telegraph, which rarely disappoints as a parody of itself. “Labour plans to make Britain even more idle” was yesterday’s editorial fume. “So much for Brexit - we might as well have stayed in” bellowed a reliably apoplectic columnist, on the same subject.

The modest provocation for this edition of outrage was Labour’s intention, as part of its employment law reforms, to give employees a right to not be pursued unreasonably by their employers outside working hours. This is likely to become an exacerbating factor in tribunal cases of unfair dismissal rather than a criminal offence.

To a more rational audience, that may not sound particularly draconian or synonymous with promoting a national malaise of idleness. It is true however that it is an idea borrowed from EU countries, like Belgium and Ireland, which per se must make it a bad thing for the Torygraph faithful. Let’s hope they have plenty more to become apoplectic about.

Even they must find a little difficulty in pinning yesterday’s economic news on a Labour government which has been in office for six weeks. Borrowing was £3 billion more last month alone than had been forecast by the Office of Budget Responsibility due to the level of government spending.

This helpfully reinforced Rachel Reeves’ message that unfunded commitments made by the Tories on a grand scale are now having to be paid for. If the Office of Budget Responsibility got it wrong at the rate of £3bn a month, what chance was there of anyone else knowing the truth until they saw the books?

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It is a style of government with which Scotland is already uncomfortably familiar. The problem is that buffers of reality are eventually hit. At least the Tories could plead that they were throwing the unfunded commitments around in the run-up to an election. For our Holyrood duffers, it was just a way of life.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that there are going to be tax increases as well as curbs in spending. That was predestined before the election and has been exacerbated by the depth of fiscal recklessness which has been uncovered since. By and large, the public know all that to be true and there is little point in arguing with facts just because one doesn’t like them.

It is a grim set of circumstances for any government of ambition to inherit but it is also a historic truth that Britain only elects Labour when the Tories are perceived to have made a complete mess of the economy. The challenge of turning that around is not judged over weeks but years. In the meantime, they have to work within the limitations imposed by what they have inherited.

Labour has committed to not increasing taxes for “working people” which is the last thing they would want to do anyway. So that means those who are already very well off are going to pay more following Rachel Reeves’ Budget in October. Every new braincell in Whitehall must be looking now at how that can be done, with minimum pain for those who can bear it least.

I am reminded of the early Budget statements I witnessed in the House of Commons before the spin-doctors took over and put all the good news up front in the Chancellor’s statement. Previously, there was a long and tedious passage of “technical” changes which hardly anyone on the Labour benches paid much attention to, far less understood.

Occasionally, however, we would hear a growl of “heah, heah” from the Tory side and we knew that the little bit of fiscal tinkering just announced had boosted the coffers of the wealthy by another few digits. More recently, such changes in taxation were reserved for the small print of accompanying documents but still pointed in the same direction. Unto them who have, it was invariably, shamelessly given.

Between now and October, the smart people around Ms Reeves need to put that process into reverse. The excessive tax breaks, the loopholes, the exemptions accumulated through the past 14 years need to be sniffed out before they even get to the higher-profile items on a Chancellor’s options list. And if those who feel persecuted as a result want to go elsewhere to count their money, that is exactly what they should be advised to do.

That will still leave Labour with limited room for manoeuvre to do the things it wants to do where spending money is involved. On that front, Labour was rightly cautious in the commitments made in the run-up to the election. If it couldn’t guarantee how to pay for it, then it couldn’t be promised. That now seems in retrospect an even more sensible way to have proceeded.

Labour did not make spending commitments it did not think coild be afforded, such as ending the two-child benefit capLabour did not make spending commitments it did not think could be afforded, famously in the case of ending the two-child benefit cap (Image: Getty)

However, it also places a high premium on delivering progressive change that does not depend on money alone. That is the more difficult part of government and it is one which every department should be challenged to meet. The same, of course, applies in Scotland, though the prospect of Mr Swinney’s dreary administration becoming a font of creative idea is beyond the bounds of reason.

For Labour, there should be no shortage of potential for changes, large and small, in the priorities and guiding principles of every branch of government which are not dependent on spending more money. In fact, spending less, better or differently would often be a good idea. Employment legislation is a very good place to start. There will be opposition to getting rid of zero-hour contracts, or enhancing people’s rights to the benefits of trade union representations and, yes, even to protecting them from overbearing employers who expect them to be at their beck and call outside working hours.

In the same way, there was deep hostility to the introduction of a National Minimum Wage at the start of the last Labour government, with exactly the same kind of objections. Governing better and advancing social justice is not all about money – though money certainly helps.

Brian Wilson is a former Labour Party politician. He was MP for Cunninghame North from 1987 until 2005 and served as a Minister of State from 1997 to 2003.