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Sir Keir Starmer’s authority is fading. His poll ratings, and Labour’s, are disastrous. Key lieutenants are departing. With Labour conference looming, the talk is less about governing than about whether Manchester mayor Andy Burnham is positioning himself for the top job. In this context, Sir Keir’s speech on Friday to fellow centre-left leaders deserves close attention. It was continuity dressed as renewal: capital behind the wheel, social policy just along for the ride.

Tellingly, Sir Keir invoked “abundance” – the buzzword of American supply-side liberals and title of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s eponymous book. In Washington, it is the banner for centrists who pin prosperity on deregulation, rapid infrastructure rollout and market-led growth, with redistribution an afterthought. Sir Keir rebranded it “social democracy”. This was some chutzpah: a rallying cry from a civil war inside America’s Democratic party dressed up as Britain’s progressive future.

In the UK, Sir Keir argues, the political flashpoint is illegal migration. He claimed it was too easy to slip into off-the-books work and stay. But migrants in Britain already live with digital proof of status: a nine-character share code handed to employers or landlords, who verify it against a Home Office database. Sir Keir now proposes to treat British citizens the same way. A universal digital ID, mandatory for the right to work, is presented as protection against a shadow economy and another Windrush scandal. In reality, it risks laying the foundations for something more far-reaching. A consultation will consider whether including “additional information … would be helpful”. That opens the door to the Tony Blair Institute’s vision: a unified digital infrastructure that can link health, welfare, housing, tax and migration records. This would be not just a work check, but a national data spine – a backbone of interoperable personal information, attractive to Big Tech. Fights loom over gender identity, police access for protest surveillance and corporate capture. Digital identity can be built as public infrastructure, empowering citizens and protecting rights as in Estonia and Denmark. Sir Keir’s choice seems to follow the Anglo-American, not European, script.

Enter Mr Burnham, sketching a different course. His “Manchesterism” sees national control of the essentials: housing, energy, transport, water. He wants prices regulated via public coordination to keep costs low. He says long-term borrowing should be used to build the social stock. He is unafraid to float another £40bn for social housing, or to dismiss “bond vigilantes” as arbiters of affordability. On the continent this is normal politics. In Britain it marks a bracing break with the post-1980s consensus.

The irony is that Sir Keir once campaigned on a similar programme: public ownership, higher taxes for the wealthy and a Green New Deal. One by one those promises were abandoned as high office came into view. What remains is cautious orthodoxy. Mr Burnham is offering Labour members what Sir  Keir once promised, before discarding it. That is, no doubt, why “Manchesterism” appeals to members and unsettles Downing Street. It is not nostalgia for municipal socialism, but closer to European models of interventionist capitalism: taming costs directly, rather than waiting for markets to deliver. The contrast is stark. Sir Keir sells continuity. Mr Burnham’s ideas offer rupture. The question for Labour conference is which future the party wants.

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When Robert Stephenson and Co’s Locomotion No 1 arrived in Stockton on 27 September 1825, the first rail vehicle ever to transport passengers, it was met by a seven-gun salute and a crowd bowled over by the spectacle. “It was found to be quite impossible to restrain the enthusiasm of the multitude,” reported a mildly concerned Durham County Observer journalist.

This weekend the celebrations are likely to be slightly less wild, as the bicentenary of the pioneering Stockton and Darlington railway line (S&DR) is marked. But they will undoubtedly be heartfelt. A replica of the pioneering engine is to recreate the inaugural journey, with viewing tickets sold out along the route and a big screen following its progress in Darlington’s town centre. A set of commemorative stamps is being issued, which feels appropriately old school. And coming in on time, the National Railway Museum in York – a magnet for visitors from the day it opened in 1975 – is reopening after a multimillion-pound refurbishment.

The businessmen who invested in the S&DR were motivated by the functional benefits of transporting coal more efficiently from Durham’s collieries. But their enterprise eventually unlocked far wider human possibilities, transforming perceptions of distance and changing the way the nation lived. Trains carried Victorian working-class families to the seaside and back, and reunited lovers on windswept platforms. Packed 20th-century commuter trains shuttled between satellite towns and cities. A railway station became part of the identity of a place, as well as a point of departure from it.

These days the railways are journeying with difficulty towards a new era. The short-sighted Beeching cuts of the 1960s, and the needless, botched privatisation of the 1990s, were unforced political errors whose legacy is still felt today. Prohibitive fares, fragmentation, and chronic mismanagement in the north, where the story began, blight the contemporary network. HS2 remains a staggeringly expensive fiasco.

As the government gradually takes more train operators back under public ownership, a much-needed strategic reboot is required. The rail industry should become a crucial driver of green sustainable growth. Sadly, reports that plans to extend high-speed rail across the north of England are yet again to be delayed do not inspire confidence.

For train lovers though, this weekend is about the past not the future. Locomotion No 1 launched a journey which was about far more than travelling from A to B. From E Nesbitt’s evocation of a rural Edwardian childhood in The Railway Children, to WH Auden’s poem, Night Mail, the trip has left its mark on our literature. Flanders and Swann memorialised lines lost to Beeching in song. Carnforth in Lancashire still celebrates its station’s role in the cinema classic Brief Encounter, where a doomed romance is brought to a close by a guard’s whistle, and the rhythmic sound of wheels beginning to move on track.

Just north of Carnforth one of Britain’s great train routes begins, as the curve of Morecambe Bay permits spectacular views of vast sands and, further away, the Lakeland fells. It would be fatuous to try to name the UK’s most beautiful railway line, but there are many to choose from. Passengers (not customers) can watch the show, read a book or fire up their laptop, enjoying the freedom of being between places. The cheering Stockton crowds of 1825 were right to think they had seen the future, and that it worked.

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