Labour’s attempts to set out its programme for government keep running into the same problem: it wants to offer a highly ambitious vision for Britain, but at the same time, it won’t commit to spending any money.

Its fiscal caution is, of course, understandable. As Sir Keir Starmer was giving his big speech on Labour’s “opportunity mission” around education and skills, the interest rates for UK government borrowing hit a 15-year high. Government finances are not in a good place, and his economic inheritance, as he keeps saying, will be far tougher than Tony Blair’s.

Gap between pledge and policy

But that means we’re left with a huge gap between Labour’s stated long-term pledges and an extremely limited policy offer. The overarching objective of this “mission” is to achieve a Scandinavian level of social mobility during Labour’s time in government.

If it’s possible to achieve this at all, it would require vast shifts in multiple policy areas - including a complete overhaul of the tax and benefits system. Yet Starmer wouldn’t even commit to ending the cruel and pointless “two-child” policy brought in by the current government in 2016.

How can a distant summit look like a plausible destination when you won’t even take a small step towards it?

End of the ‘class ceiling’

In his speech, Starmer talked of ending the “class ceiling” and equalising opportunity - all laudable aims that no one disagrees with in principle. But successive governments have been trying to do that for decades with little progress.

This is largely because wealthier voters are quite a lot less keen on policies that would really rebalance society than they are about the theoretical idea. Just look at that fuss over Labour’s proposal to put VAT on private school fees, which is hardly a radical suggestion.

The education policies on offer in Labour’s plan - a bunch of tweaks to the accountability system, some retention payments for teachers, and an enhanced Department for Education school improvement offer - are fine as far as they go, but realistically they’re not going to make a dent in centuries of embedded inequality.

Knowledge and skills

The section on curriculum was, perhaps deliberately, hard to decipher. No one disagrees we need both knowledge and skills, if, by skills, we mean things like learning an instrument or repairing a car engine - those things are just procedural knowledge. Speaking and digital skills - if carefully defined - would fall into that category.

But in the longer policy document accompanying the speech, which outlined the principles that would sit behind Labour’s curriculum review, there was also talk of “attributes” - presumably things like creativity and resilience - which, while desirable, are not definable skills and cannot usefully be included in a curriculum, as many countries, including Scotland, have found.

The fear is the review just ends up as a messy compromise between contradictory positions.

There is perhaps a more substantive opportunity around early years, given the government have already decided to invest an extra £5 billion a year in expanding free places for under threes. Labour’s policy proposals here showed promising signs that it understands the importance of reforming the nursery market, improving the workforce and simply offering more places. But we still await details.

What about welfare?

The glaring hole - of which there was no mention in the speech or document - is welfare. If families don’t have enough money for food, heating or proper housing, then any ambition to reduce intergenerational inequality is going to sound hollow. There is just a limit to what an education system can do to ameliorate such profound differences in living standards.

At some point, Labour needs to make a choice. Either it needs to bridge the chasm between its grand ambitions and small-scale policies with at least a few big transformative proposals - that will undoubtedly cost money. Or it needs to stop talking about those ambitions and limit expectations.

Right now, the disconnect means Labour’s rhetoric lacks credibility at a time when voters are not inclined to give politicians the benefit of the doubt.

Sam Freedman is a senior fellow at the Institute for Government and a former senior policy adviser at the Department for Education