The Daily News Summary - 16 August

Yesterday the boldest ideas came from the party with no power to enact them, while a government only weeks old spent the day reacting to events rather than shaping them.

Reform set the terms. The party used the quiet of an August weekend to put out the most ambitious domestic plan anyone has offered this year: a wholesale overhaul of working-age welfare that would scrap the main disability payment, move more of the long-term sick toward work, and take tens of billions out of the bill. Most of the papers led on it. Whether the sums survive contact with reality is a fair challenge, and the objections arrived within the hour - that the vulnerable would be hurt, that the savings are hopeful rather than real. But the plan did the thing an opposition is for and a tired government seldom manages: it named a cost the main parties have spent a decade walking around, and it was willing to be unpopular about it.

Set that against the government's own day, which was mostly weather. After the driest of summers, wildfires spread across parts of the country, an emergency alert went to millions of phones, and the army was called in to help. Ministers announced support for farmers battered by the drought, and were told by some of them that it had come too late. This is a government that can move quickly - but so far mainly once the thing it should have prepared for is already alight. Competent reaction isn't nothing. It's also not a plan.

The Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, is discovering how fast a summer honeymoon fades. The warm notices that greeted his arrival have cooled into questions about tax, about the defence budget, about whether the early energy was ever more than mood. None of it is fatal. All of it is the sound of a government that has stopped being new.

Reform, for its part, spent as much of the day on its own affairs as on the country's. The win at Clacton hasn't quieted the questions about the party's finances, and its officials picked a loud fight with a mobile network over SIM cards handed to migrants - the kind of row that fills an afternoon and moves nothing. Some pollsters even had the party slipping. A movement that wants to be taken seriously as a government-in-waiting keeps choosing the argument that trends over the one that governs.

The one moment the government reached for an argument rather than a reaction came on immigration and work. The Defence Secretary, John Healey, suggested that a million young Britons could take up the jobs left behind as migration falls - an attempt, at least, to tie a real claim to a contested promise, and to make the case that lower immigration and higher youth employment are two ends of the same policy. It's arguable in both directions. It was, at least, an argument.

Beyond Britain, the same gap between the announced and the real. Iran again threatened to choke off the Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world's oil must pass, while across the Atlantic an American president talked of emergencies and defeats. Threats are cheap; the tankers keep sailing until they don't. A declared intention isn't yet a fact on the water.

An opposition with nothing to lose can afford to be interesting; a government with everything to lose spends its days putting out fires, some of them literal. That's the ordinary asymmetry of power, and no scandal. The question the autumn will settle is a simpler one: whether this government has anything it actually wants to build, or only things it's waiting to react to.

An opinion of the house.