Britain’s economic crisis offers an opportunity for new ideas – Labour must be ready

‘Labour has made some good steps in the right direction, but now’s the time to go further.’ Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

When Liz Truss and her chancellor drew up the policies that crashed the pound and threatened pension funds, they were working to a blueprint devised in the Hotel du Parc of Mont-Pèlerin in 1947.

Among those gathered were the economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman and the philosopher Karl Popper, and they were profoundly depressed. “The central values of civilisation are in danger,” they declared, caused by a “decline of belief in private property and the competitive market” after the Great Depression and world wars. They fleshed out a belief that the state and collectivism were mortal threats to the individual’s ability to succeed: Margaret Thatcher and her would-be torchbearer Truss would come to follow it with zeal.