He needs to man up too, and face down Labour’s backbench MPs. If he caves in to their endless demands for more tax and more spending, we’re heading for serious trouble. As the autumn Budget edges closer, he should also remember what happened to predecessor Rachel Reeves. She let months of tax speculation rage out of control, battering confidence and sending investors running. Healey risks making exactly the same mistake. If Healey carries on like this, and the signs aren’t good, his reputation will collapse just as quickly as hers. Andy Burnham needs to wake up too, but since he’s on his hols we’ll leave him out of this for now.

Yesterday I highlighted how Healey is plotting a new £9billion-a-year borrowing spree, which he’ll justify by fiddling the fiscal rules. Incredibly, the news emerged at the same time as the UK’s national debt hit £3trillion for the first time. He should be looking to curb spending, not increase it. But that’s Labour for you. Every day, the left pushes for new taxes on, well, just about anything that moves.

The long-running campaign for a wealth tax is gathering pace. Plenty of backbench Labour MPs back that, along with unions, think tanks and the rest. Others want London-listed oil and gas giants BP and Shell to pay even more tax, even though they already face a staggering marginal rate of 78%. Labour is also being urged to go after the big banks. Every time a successful sector makes a profit, somebody on the left demands a bigger slice. Healey has even thrown shade on our brilliantly efficient supermarkets. He should praise them to the skies instead.

Burnham is at it himself. He’s previously called for a new land tax, a new 50% top rate of income tax, and a 10% inheritance tax surcharge to help fund social care. A grizzled-looking Neil Kinnock has emerged from his cave calling for capital gains tax to rise. Left-wing think tanks constantly churn out new ideas to hammer anybody who works, saves or invests. You have to wonder why anybody bothers. Soon they won’t.

We’re already seeing the damage. Last month investors pulled £1.6billion from UK stock market funds as tax fears gathered pace. That’s the biggest monthly outflow since the panic triggered by Rachel Reeves‘ autumn Budget, when she piled another £26billion of tax rises on top of the previous year’s £40billion.

We’ve already seen BP retreat from the North Sea as punitive taxes hammered profitability. Speculation is growing that it could move its London listing to New York, with Shell, AstraZeneca and HSBC drawn into the same debate. They publicly play it down, but the speculation refuses to die.

London’s biggest companies increasingly look across the Atlantic, where valuations are higher and capital easier to find. Labour is giving them yet another reason to decamp. Our government should be making Britain a competitive and compelling place to do business. Instead, it just wants to keep rinsing the rich and damn the consequences.

Britain isn’t going to get richer if Labour drives away profitable companies and successful people. Many on the left would cheerfully wave them off, but there’s a problem. The top 1% of taxpayers contribute 30% of all income tax receipts. The more who leave, the less HMRC collects, and the more everybody else has to pay. Unless we cut spending, of course, but the left won’t allow that.

Labour MPs threaten Healey for even hinting at benefit cuts. If he repeats another Rachel Reeves mistake and fails to produce properly thought-out reforms to reduce health and sickness costs while protecting the truly needy, we’re done for. Ideally he should reverse Reeves’s delusional £25billion ‘jobs tax’, which lit a rocket under youth unemployment.

Britain is already losing billions. Unless Healey gets a grip now, we’ll lose a lot more. And we won’t get it back. Perhaps Andy Burnham could drop by when he gets back from his hols, and discuss it with him.