Philip Hammond said yesterday that the Tories must try to champion the market economy. This won’t work.

For one thing, Labour is not really challenging the market economy. Aditya is right to say it is offering “moderate social democracy… capitalism, of a kind that Angela Merkel would know.” Labour’s nationalization plans focus upon those industries where it believes markets are not working. By all means criticize their diagnosis or remedy, but hyperventilating about them overthrowing the market economy is just stupid. Nationalizing the railways will make us resemble not Venezuela but Germany - and even the most fanatical Brexiter shouldn't panic about this.

There’s a further problem. It’s that mainstream Tories are not full-blooded free marketeers. In the labour market, they have raised the minimum wage and support immigration controls. In the housing market they favour planning restrictions that stop new building and Help to Buy, measures deplored by serious free marketeers. And there are some markets many Tories want to suppress, such as in sex and recreational drugs. Nor is there anything new about all this. As BBC4’s documentary on Friday reminded us, the Thatcher government’s supposed support for free markets and entrepreneurs didn’t stop it repressing pirate radio stations*.

Of course, you might reply that such restrictions are needed because free markets are not always a good thing. That’s entirely reasonable. But it carries two costs.

One is that it means you can’t use Hayek’s defence of free markets:

Since the value of freedom rests on the opportunities it provides for unforeseeable and unpredictable actions, we will rarely know what we lose through a particular restriction of freedom….when we decide each issue solely on what appear to be its individual merits, we always over-estimate the advantages of central direction. (Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol I p56-57)

The second is that it means the difference between Labour and the Tories is not a matter of principle but of empirics: to what extent is any particular market working well, and if it isn’t what is the best remedy?

Which raises a further problem. Hammond doesn’t grasp the severity of our economic malaise. His claim that “our economy is not broken: it is fundamentally strong” reminds me of Monty Python’s Black Knight protesting that the loss of his arms was “just a flesh wound.” Ten years of stagnant real wages and the worst productivity performance since the start of the industrial revolution tell us that the economy is indeed broken. Windy talk about the market economy won’t fix it. Pretending that the economy is basically fine merely entrenches the impression that the Tories support only the most decadent sections of capital: landlords, rent-seekers and parasitic finance.

* The fact these were run by many black people was, no doubt, just a coincidence.