I’ve been fascinated by the extent to which the new government’s policies are focused on reversing every decision that has irritated them – and many of their colleagues – of the last decade. They’re borrowing a staggering amount of money to turn back the clock on Cameron/Osborne, May, and Johnson.

This is true of tax – reversing corporation tax, reversing NI, reversing stamp duty rises, axing sugar tax. It is true of regulation – reversing the fracking moratorium, reversing the fois gras ban (is fox hunting next?)

The enemy isn’t Labour. It is others in the Conservative party.

Does that matter? I think a bit, for two reasons. The first is practical – do we really think that if the government hadn’t done these things over the last decade, growth would have been massively higher? Was there a much better trajectory before rises in corporation tax were promised and NI was reduced? I don‘t think there was…reversing old decisions, at huge cost, seems unlikely to put us on a completely different path.

The second is philosophical. It just seems like the analysis is backwards looking, not forward looking. If you were starting completely from scratch, and trying to boost the economy, would your main policies just happen to be reversing the taxes that have gone up in the last few years, or the things that happen to have been banned? I don’t think they would. If you were a Conservative government, new, with the basic analysis Truss and Kwarteng have, I think you’d do something radical on investment incentives like full expensing (I’m not saying the arguments that Rob Colvile and others make on corporation tax aren’t convincing – but it’s not the new set of radical decisions you’d make).

You’d turn to planning first, not tax, to boost the housing market. You’d look at broad brush permissions for energy supply (including the very cheap and fast onshore wind) rather than just focus on fracking. The only exception I can think of are innovation zones – obviously they are a Heseltinian idea, and a smaller version was done with free ports, but it’s a new attempt to analyse left behind areas and boost them.

I know many people are labelling Truss as radical. She may prove to be. She certainly thinks of herself that way. I’m just not convinced, yet, that her decisions match (in the next few days my colleague Jonathan Dupont, who worked on Britannia Unchained and cowrote some of Kwasi Kwarteng’s other books, will set out those decisions and the radicalism underneath them, and he probably wouldn’t agree with me on this blog).

To be fair, the government might say – this is the beginning. The more important measures are to come (which would have to be proper deregulation, particularly on planning, in my view).  I haven’t seen this yet, but it is early days.

And to be clear, this lack of new analysis seems true of Labour too. Blair’s essay, a year ago, was a reminder of what it’s like to have a leader – and a party – that thinks anew. I didn’t think all his ideas were right, but it was analysis. There are unquestionably thinkers on the right (and left) who provide this. It’s just not really evident in government or at PMQs.

I accept there is little mandate – Truss can present NI, at least, as returning to the manifesto (which promised not to raise it). More fundamental changes are harder. I also don’t think that new ideas are necessarily better – I’m not arguing for novelty for novelty’s sake. But I do hope that, tomorrow and in the coming months, she and her chancellor will set out a plan that seems to be about the challenges we face now, and how to solve them – not what has annoyed them in the past.