Rachel Reeves has handled this week's financial plan similar to a reluctant swimmer creeping into icy water, striving to ease the hardship through step-by-step entry.
Reeves commenced dealing with the challenge of insufficient revenue towards the close of summer. Initially, she declined to support former assertions that increases in taxation in last year's financial statement would be the final ones.
Then, recently, she took a larger stride into the icy sea. Her remarks committed to "do what is necessary" to fund government services and control borrowing costs under control.
After 10 days, the finance ministry had retracted the suggestion. The election promise remained intact in the end. Similar to any cold-water bather understands, this halted immersion and trembling withdrawal is the worst of all techniques. No tactic draws out the pain like indecision.
It's challenging to be firm when deciding between levels of internally generated harm.
Expectation has not been a great tactic for the ruling party. Fundamental of the prime minister's election bid was the vain expectation of somehow meeting the public's demand for better public services without overturning billions of pounds of Tory revenue decreases.
At no point has both Starmer or the chancellor successfully conveyed a sense of collective goal to explain all this pain. To some extent that is a challenge of personality appeal. Both leaders are strikingly alike in their ineffective messaging, stilted and reserved in a way that drives listeners away instead of drawing them towards them.
In the same way that political pressure to support state services has compelled the exchequer to concede that taxes must go up, the commercial requirement of increasing prosperity makes it ever harder to ignore the cost of detachment from the continental trading bloc.
The government used a twelve months splashing in the initial phase of realignment with the European Union: suggestions to end customs checks on farm products; a young people's exchange program. Aspiration went a further on power generation, defence and security cooperation, but no major deals has so far been signed.
In the absence specific instruction and impetus from Downing Street, talks are bogged down. EU officials says economic advantages are obtained with payments to the continental treasury. UK ministers understand that's the deal. That doesn't lead them eager for a visible argument and campaigners screaming betrayal over the eventual amount ends up being paid.
Commercial conditions has provoked some adjustment in Labour's language on the EU relationship. She has commenced identifying EU withdrawal alongside the Covid pandemic as a cause of commercial injury that the finance ministry is striving to repair. Government colleagues have emulated this, although they deliberately ascribe the fault to "unfavorable agreement" or "the exit process", never just "withdrawal".
The challenge of the nation's future relationship with the European Union can't be reduced to administrative modifications and import controls when the entire international system is in significant transformation. Given everything that has occurred since the referendum year, it feels appropriate still to be asking the fundamental issue: were the UK's priorities advanced by departing the European Union?
These are sobering, challenging realities about the nation's predicament in choppy international waters. It is not surprising that the prime minister and the chancellor flinch from the challenge. It would take them outside their comfort zone, into currents that they dare not resist. So rather they carry on nervously pacing the coastline, praying that perhaps shortly the tide will change.
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