There has been so much focus on the likely foreign policy of Jeremy Corbyn if he were to become prime minister that a greater danger has been obscured. Yesterday the Labour leader did his best to clarify his position in a detailed speech in Birmingham about the party’s plans for the economy if it were to form the next government.

Mr Corbyn’s economics are, quite consciously, a break from what he and his team describe as the “neo-liberal consensus” that they believe has governed economic policy since 1979. Simply put, this consensus is the view that markets create economic prosperity and that government should be limited in its ambitions to regulate those markets. Mr Corbyn offered a firm critique of the idea that the freer