Chancellor Rachel Reeves has endured a tough start to the year.

Turmoil in the gilt market in early January sparked comparisons to Liz Truss as well as prompting (slightly far-fetched) calls for her resignation.

Although gilt jitters have eased, the embattled Chancellor now faces a new and far more serious criticism.

Over the past few days a number of commentators have come to roughly the same conclusion: Labour does not have a growth plan.

Worse, it has fragments of different plans stitched together into an unconvincing whole, no matter that the different parts appear to be inconsistent. Less socialism, more hotchpotchism.

This point was made by Professor Ben Ansell in a piece published on his Substack last week. Ansell goes on a whistle-stop tour of five different theories of economic growth, all of which feature in the government’s thinking.

There’s orthodox neoclassical economics, based around attracting private sector investment, as well as a dash of Gordon Brown’s ‘endogenous growth theory’, which stresses the power of government spending in key sectors to catalyse technological innovation.

Throw in some ambitious state-led development in energy, a bit of supply-side deregulation on housing, and a half-measure of Schumpeterian creative destruction on technology and you have something approaching the government’s economic agenda.

The argument goes that the government has taken aspects of each school of thought without noticing the contradictions, or perhaps just hoping that the theoretical contradictions do not matter in the real world.

The worry is that different aspects of Labour’s plan will cancel out. “You can’t treat grand, clashing economic schools of thought like a jaunt through Woolworths pick and mix,” Ansell writes.

To take one example, Reeves claimed that she would lead the most “pro-business” Treasury in the UK’s history before entering office, a fairly clear pitch for private sector investment.

Just a few months later and businesses were at the sharp end of a £25bn increase in payroll taxes, the proceeds of which will go towards the public sector.

The government’s ambitions on AI are also a little difficult to square with levelling up workers’ rights, given the disruption that AI is likely to cause in the jobs market.

All of this lends the government’s most recent growth announcements – which are centred on stripping back unnecessary red tape – an air of desperation.

Is this part of a plan? Or is this just one possible ‘growth lever’ among many that can be pulled?

Commenting on this theme in the Times, Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), identified another problem with Labour’s hotchpotchism.