For those of us old enough to remember the fun days of Margaret Thatcher, this week has had the invigorating element of déjà vu. The Prime Minister’s speech about renationalising utilities, taking homes off neglectful landlords, establishing a National Care Service, tackling the triple lock, electoral reform and, possibly, reversing Brexit felt like a return to the days when politics were politics, not optics or presentation. Mind you, Andy Burnham is good on the optics. The palpable emotion about his father’s death was human and real. As for the nostalgia vibe, The Sun warned against “a return to the 1970s”… yippee!

These are all big issues. Alas, no one had a kind word to say about Theresa May, who was the last to grasp the nettle of social care — John McDonnell, Jeremy Corbyn’s lefty shadow chancellor, claimed he “can’t remember” what he had to say about that. As I recall, it was to bill her proposals a “dementia tax”. Burnham, by contrast, spoke of a National Care Service “free at the point of use” which is a nice way of saying we’d be paying for it upstream.

It was invigorating. But if we’re really returning to the 1970s, Mrs T would be reminding us that the books must be balanced, that any household, even the national household, has to pay its debts, and buying things on the never-never isn’t the way to go. Or to put it another way, the national debt right now is nudging £3 trillion, nearly 95 per cent of GDP — up from 35 per cent in 2007/8. That’s 12 noughts, folks, viz, a thousand billion. Servicing the debt — and interest payments go up as well as down — costs about £109 billion a year. Mrs T wouldn’t have let us forget it.

So, how do you do the sums? Growth, duh, but some of Sir Keir Starmer’s policies — increasing National Insurance contributions, say — ended up as a tax on employment. Naturally, Burnham is pleased with himself for reforming the triple lock — though I don’t think I’ve ever heard a single pensioner spontaneously talk about it — promising instead a link between pensions and earnings.

All good but, as Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies points out, the savings, starting in 2030, come nowhere near the costs of a decent at-home care service. Remember, we’re not talking about residential care costs. We can only thank God that the bloody assisted suicide bill got nowhere, because the temptation to encourage elderly relatives to save on the care home bill would be too much for some I can think of.

So, if the triple lock isn’t paying for Andy B’s plans, including increased defence spending, what is? London should be wary, very wary, of any attempt to introduce an additional property tax based on land value because, if there is one thing we can be sure of, it’s that it will fall disproportionately on the capital. I’m not sure the PM cares but the Mayor should.

One approach would be to reinstate the health and social care levy — on payslips alongside National Insurance — on all wage-earners; it was one of Liz Truss’s stupid moves to scrap it, but funnily enough it could work. It’s honest, it’s an insurance policy against old age, it says what it is. I am as little inclined to pay more tax as anyone but this, if ringfenced, would help.

Then there is the other side of the equation: to cut other spending. That means Burnham having to take on his backbenchers and bolshie Cabinet colleagues. It means addressing the cost of welfare: an estimated £77.1 billion on disability benefits this year. Some £3.4 billion of that was spent on Personal Independence Payments — Pips — for those suffering from mental health issues such as anxiety and depression. The last attempt to do that ended with backbench rebellion; I’m not sure they’d have the stomach for it now.

Me, I would scrap Pips for starters. It’s a perverse encouragement to people to magnify the problems in their heads in order to be paid for them; it incentivises people who don’t have clinical depression to claim they’re depressed, or have ADHD. Just tell the former claimants that their depression will be nothing to the anxiety they’ll have when they have to work to pay the rent rather than relying on handouts which never existed before the last Tory government (thanks, Jeremy Hunt). Yet Burnham says his savings will come “‘not through crude cuts, that should never be the Labour way, but [by] investing in people”. Hah.

The other issue is immigration. Not just illegal arrivals — more than 18,000 so far this year — but the consequences of the Boriswave when, in four years, more than a million people came to Britain annually. Most weren’t working in the care sector; they were the dependents and families of workers. Unless their inexorable path to citizenship is reviewed — and there’s no reason why a visa for work must entail citizenship — that will entail vast future spending in terms of benefits and services.

So, lovely speech, Andy. But the hard business of thinking it through remains.