Careful what you wish for, Keir.

An election right now would be a disaster for Labour.

The ritual calls for a general election “now!” by Labour politicians cannot conceal their inner angst at what would happen if there were one. The last thing Sir Keir Starmer wants is to inherit the chaos of the present, with 10% inflation, rolling strikes, interest rates rising to 5% and the NHS struggling with the pandemic backlog.

The first thing an incoming Labour administration would have to do is accept the dictates of the Office for Budget Responsibility. That means endorsing the “eyewatering” spending cuts across the public sector that the Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, is about to announce in his Halloween statement. International financiers are demanding fiscal austerity as the price of continuing to lend to the UK government at affordable rates of interest.

Labour has been celebrating the immolation of the Tories in the fires of the international markets. But bond vigilantes are no friend of Labour governments, even if they effectively destroyed Liz Truss. As I pointed out here, since the days of Harold Wilson, international money men have been the deadly enemies of Labour governments.

The bond traders didn't wreck Liz Truss's “budget for growth” because they are Labour supporters after all. They did it because it didn't add up, left a £70bn funding gap and threatened the future value of sterling. Labour has committed itself to balancing the books. Every speech by Rachel Reeves condemns the folly and recklessness of the Truss government in cutting taxes for the most wealthy.

But Labours dilemma is that it will have to face up to taxing the many not the few if it wants to restore the NHS, pay peoples' gas bills, meet union wage demands, raise defence spending and finance things like social care. The 45P rate has been restored as has the corporation tax increase. Rachel Reeves has said repeatedly she will not be “ increasing taxes on ordinary working people and the businesses who employ them”. But the Tories have already implemented her planned tax increases on the wealthy people

Fiddling with non dom status for foreign businessmen and women (like Rishi Sunak’s wife) and imposing a further windfall tax on the energy giants will not raise a fraction of what is needed just to meet Labour's promise on refunding the NHS and social care. Labour have endorsed Boris Johnson's £12bn health fix without the National Insurance hike that was to pay for it.

Many non domiciled businessmen will simply leave. Restoring the cap on banker bonuses will actually raise nothing because the banks had simply made up for that by increasing their employee's basic pay. Labour know this. Anyway, the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is already on the case and talking about a windfall tax on bank profits – a populist move since they've been coining even more than BP while generating nothing but debt.

Labour had a very clear message last week from the TUC: unions are back in business. The rail strikes showed that public are rather well disposed towards unions right now, even though few of them earn as much as ASLEF train drivers. As the Scottish government has discovered, public sector unions aren't bought off by sympathetic anti-Tory rhetoric, or the fact that they are paid rather more than their counterparts south of the border. They want hard cash.

So, an election campaign right now, followed by a change of government, would restore the climate of instability and directionlessness that created the run on the pound in the first place. Labour's promises on public spending, while rejecting tax increases, risks provoking a similar response to Kwasi Kwarteng's libertarian tax cuts albeit for the opposite reasons. There is no way Britain's economic crisis is going to be resolved in the next 12 months. Better to let the Tories wallow in the mire of their own incompetence. As Napoleon said: never interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake.