«Taxes would be increased on the wealthy to pay for struggling public services.»

Increasing taxes on the wealthy does not generate that much revenue; it is good in itself to reduce concentration of power and also simply because state spending and investment enables so much of private wealth accumulation. The state is in effect an implicit silent capital partners in every enterprise.

«But none of Labour’s flagship policies are remotely controversial in Germany, which is the most productive and dynamic economy in Europe, or in the Scandinavian countries, which consistently sit at the top of global rankings on socio-economic development.»

But is not a political issue, it is a cultural/anthropological issue: the elites in power in those countries regard the lower classes as co-citizens, not as “bulk headcount” like in the USA or much of England.

«The proposal to break RBS up into a network of local public banks»

Breaking up banks and making them into partnerships is a good idea, doing so with RBS would be daft, because it is weak. For best chances of success it is strong banks that should be broken up. And certainly not as a network and not too local: because the real power of large banks is their lobbying power.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/14/theresa-may-victory-must-not-get-in-way-clear-ideology#comment-98534689
“47% of the UK population live in areas as productive as the former East Germany. Outside the south-east, the UK has a massive infrastructure deficit: per head, its just 40% of the OECD average.”

That is after 38 years of Conservative/New Labour neoliberalism, the smashing of the unions, the freeing of regulation on finance, etc, which were claimed would give the UK a surge in investment and productivity by unleashing the magical powers of capital and markets.

But the diagnosis in the article is the usual “dogooderish leftie” one: in particular here:

«Years of austerity»

Because there has been short or no austerity in the UK, and there are many signs that government policy is far too “expansionary”: asset prices are booming, immigration is booming, imports are booming, lots of upper income and higher wealth people, especially in the south, are enjoying rising living standards.

As there has been short or no austerity so far, government intervention in the economy has barely slowed: there has been instead a policy of redistribution upwards, where government intervention has been redirected from “improductive” workers to “wealth creating” property and business rentiers. G Osborne pithily summarized this as:

“A credible fiscal plan allows you to have a looser monetary policy than would otherwise be the case. My approach is to be fiscally conservative but monetarily active.”

The neoliberal Economists who call that redistribution “austerity” just want government policy to be even more expansionary to further boost asset prices, as it was in 1997-2007 in the USA, in the UK, and other anglo-american culture countries (plus Spain, Latvia, etc.).

You only have to read the IFS report on Labour’s to know that Labour’s spending plans would leave this country in debt for a generation or more. Worse still, in the hands of Corbyn & co it would be squandered with absolutely bugger-all to show for the mountain of debt.