Labour’s economic plans will shake up the stale status quo

‘The challenge Reeves faces is whether her “new model of economic management” is sufficiently strong to overcome the obstacles to change.’ Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Your claim that “Rachel Reeves prefers a deadening consensus, sacrificing policies to placate business” is absurd, and fails to recognise the radicalism of Reeves’ recent Mais lecture (Editorial, 28 April). Although the need for fiscal stability was mentioned, the main theme of the lecture was quite different. It was about Britain’s increasing economic backwardness – “a failure to deliver the supply-side reform needed to equip Britain to compete in a fast-changing world”.

Reeves’s allocation of primacy to institutional reform recalls the analysis of economic backwardness by the great Harvard economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron. Gerschenkron argued that economic success derives from the development of new institutions that channel funds into the large-scale investment that is necessary not just to catch up but to surpass successful competitors.