This day was not meant to happen. The 2010 spending review was supposed to take us through this parliament and to the end of austerity. That terminus is as far away now as it was then. The deficit has not closed for want of cuts but of growth. Precisely as Ed Balls warned, the cuts have curbed growth, eroding the tax receipts necessary to pay down the deficit.

While the 2013 spending review is the bitter fruit of George Osborne’s failures, James Forsyth reports in The Spectator that the chancellor has been in bullish spirits lately. ‘It is clear that Osborne is close to restoring his standing in the Tory party. Last year’s unravelling budget is becoming an increasingly distant memory.’ If this spending review is to unravel too, it will do so over days and weeks, not minutes and hours. As of this afternoon, we are too near to its delivery to know whether this will be the case.

Fewer leaks preceded this spending review than last year’s budget. Those that did – such as the relatively limited cut of five per cent to the Arts Council – were thought to be more accidental than politically choreographed. Vince Cable’s resolve to boost capital spending serves to give him some political definition. But, for the most part, both governing parties resisted the temptation to throw out advance goodies to their supporters. It would be to Labour’s detriment if it instead focused on the detail of the spending review, ironing out unforced errors and diminishing the likelihood of it unravelling.

Both governing parties seem to have concluded that less is more, in various senses: less pre-briefing means less unravelling – though Duncan Weldon has identified something that looks suspiciously like the unravelling of the claimed boost to capital spending; the more the media and public talk of the need for less government (cuts), the less we focus on flatlining growth and the ballooning cost of living; and the more the government focuses debate on a limited number of areas where it broadly enjoys public support – cuts, welfare, immigration – the less the government needs to talk about and to give attention to other policy matters.

Labour must expand this shrivelled debate. Not centrally in terms of the topics the debate covers, but its shrunken horizons. The increased fiscal realism that Labour has demonstrated in recent weeks is a necessary but not sufficient condition of victory in 2015. We have to be not only an affordable alternative but a better future.

As the public’s hopes and expectations are so reduced, they swallow Osborne’s grim prospectus. Labour has to remain affordable, while being the reason that these hopes are raised and his prospectus rejected. Osborne played his hand for 2015 today. Labour will have done so when we rise to this challenge.

2015 is about credible hope for Labour. Recent weeks have built credibility – now must come the hope.

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Jonathan Todd is a contributing editor to Progress. He tweets @jonathan_todd