Reform’s tales of wasteland Britain won’t work. There’s a far larger market for hope | Gaby Hinsliff

Abundance is Rachel Reeves’s summer beach read, and with its optimistic ideas about energy and housing, it shows the left a possible way forward

Sheer joy. That’s how it felt watching England’s Lionesses romping gleefully across the pitch after their victory in Basel – not just because they won but because of the way they did it, with an exuberance and a resilience and an obvious love of playing together that makes them irresistible to watch. That 65,000 people came out in the drizzle for their homecoming parade down the Mall was testament not just to the deserved new popularity of women’s football but also to the longing for a national event that, even if only briefly, made us feel cheerful, expansive, as if all things were possible.

So it’s interesting that for her summer beach reading Rachel Reeves picked Abundance, the American journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s blueprint for the more permanent rebuilding of hope and joy. It’s a pro-growth, techno-optimist rallying cry for progressives to reinvent themselves as purveyors of plenty and good times in contrast to the right’s crabby, mean-spirited “scarcity mindset” – which revolves around the belief that there isn’t enough good stuff to go round and therefore the priority is snatching it back off immigrants or the poor or whatever bewildered former ally Donald Trump accuses of ripping America off.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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