Britain has built a department to conjure growth before. It lasted five years.

The picture of the future on offer this week is a familiar one: that the way to make a country grow faster is to build, or in this case rebuild, the right department to do it. It is worth knowing that Britain has run this experiment before, and named it almost as plainly.

In October 1964, Harold Wilson created the Department of Economic Affairs. Its job was explicit: to break the Treasury's grip on economic policy and drive national growth through planning rather than caution. Wilson handed it to his deputy, George Brown, and Brown produced, in 1965, a National Plan setting a target of 25% growth across the decade. It was serious, ambitious, staffed by clever people. By 1966 the plan had been effectively abandoned in a sterling crisis, and by 1969 the department itself was wound up, its functions absorbed back into the machinery it had been built to challenge. The lesson historians drew was not that its people were foolish. It was that a growth ambition given a new building and an org chart is still, underneath, a growth ambition, and the building does not supply what the ambition lacks.

That is the rhyme worth hearing this week. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology was itself created in February 2023, carved out of the old culture department by a previous government as its signal that it took technology seriously. Barely two years on, a new government proposes to fold it into a larger economic department as its signal that it takes growth seriously. Each move is presented as decisive. Each is, in the long record, the same recurring British habit: reaching for the shape of the state when what is wanted is a result the shape cannot conjure. The Institute for Government, surveying decades of these changes, puts it drily: new structures are no substitute for collaboration.

But the historian's job is also to say where the analogy stops, and here it genuinely does. Wilson's planners were trying to accelerate an economy whose pace they broadly controlled: British factories, British output, a domestic machine to be tuned. The thing this reorganisation is meant to keep up with is neither domestic nor patient. The capability at the centre of it is developed largely outside Britain and is getting cheaper and more widespread by the month, on a clock no transfer-of-functions order can slow. Wilson's department failed to make the economy grow faster. This one is being asked to help Britain keep pace with something already moving faster than the government reshaping itself to chase it. That is a harder brief than 1964's, not an easier one, and a strange moment to spend on the furniture.

None of this forecasts how the plan ends. It is not signed, and it may not happen. The long view offers perspective, not a verdict: only the reminder that Britain has repeatedly mistaken redrawing the department for doing the work, and has repeatedly been surprised when the redrawing turned out to be the easy part.

Why it matters here: This is British institutional history, and it is close to hand. The next time a reorganisation is described as bold action, the 1964 to 1969 record is worth holding beside it: the label on the door changed, the growth did not arrive, and five years were spent finding that out.