We live in an age of stunts and soundbites so it was refreshing to hear a politician stand up and, for the best part of an hour, explain their political philosophy to an audience savvy enough to shred it. That’s what Labour’s Rachel Reeves did at last night’s Mais lecture.

She summoned the ghosts of heterodox leftists Karl Polanyi, Joan Robinson and Marie Curie to explain that Britain stands on the brink of a global economic regime change just as big as the one begun in 1979, that the Tories have left us bystanders, and that Labour is the only party that can make it happen.

Though she didn’t mention Margaret Thatcher by name (and never planned to, I understand) the speech, and the fiscal rules it outlined, has generated ‘Iron Lady’ headlines. But if we look behind these, there are five takeaways that embody the logic of her argument.

Reeves is telling the OBR to adopt a new, or at least more analytically diverse, approach to fiscal modelling

1. What’s wrong? Reeves believes the neoliberal economic model is broken. She doesn’t use the word ‘neoliberal’ because it’s left-speak, but that’s what she means: globalisation in its old form is dying and economic strategies framed around expectations of stability won’t work.

Instead, we’re living in a new age of insecurity driven by geopolitical instability, technological change and the climate crisis. ‘There is no viable growth strategy today,’ she said ‘which does not rest upon resilience for our national economy and security for working people.’ In case it’s not obvious, that is the antithesis of the assumptions behind Blairism.

2. What’s the solution? This was not the first time Reeves has outlined her ‘Securonomics’ strategy, focused on investment-led growth, but it was the most detailed. Labour knows that the high tax take, together with high debt and high debt servicing costs mean there can be no return to ‘borrow-and-spend’ unless the economy achieves sustained growth.