This can be a year of reinvigoration for Britain if we are true to our freedom-loving principles

"Take Back Control” was the Brexit clarion call. Politicians must heed the demand. 2019 will see us return many powers from Brussels to Westminster. But this year we should honour that command domestically, too.

People won’t want powers being handed back from bureaucrats in Brussels to be given to bureaucrats in Britain. Our aim should be to give the British people greater control of their lives in all regards. In practical terms, that requires a three-pronged agenda: combatting Jeremy Corbyn’s ideas for a state-on-steroids; delivering a growing economy; and finding more areas in which we can transfer powers from the government to the people.

The stakes are high. Commentators, riffing off shadow chancellor John McDonnell, talk about the turn against free markets. In the abstract, capitalism is unpopular. But free markets are an expression of free will. As the Sunday Telegraph’s bold Campaign for Capitalism has highlighted, markets allow people to make their own choices, and to own their futures, rather than be told what to do by a distant authority.

Despite Labour’s fetish for nationalisation, most of the services Britons love are privately provided, from coffee shops to Spotify. Choice is a national instinct. This capitalist bedrock of our prosperity and security is threatened by a Labour Party that wants to overthrow the whole system.

As free-marketeers, Conservatives should unashamedly pitch this battle as one of freedom versus Corbyn’s control. We should pitch to the young who are setting up more businesses, and who want more personal responsibility and lower taxes than their forebears. We should back the power of new tech to transform lives and empower individuals, and resist those who want to shackle it. Business should join us. We are fighting a Labour Party whose avowed enemy is capitalist bosses, whose instinct is to see income as a common pool resource, and whose leading figures find profit morally repugnant.