Labour has caught the mood of the times. Now it needs new ideas to remake capitalism | Will Hutton

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John McDonnell has made some valuable proposals, but should wean himself off old fixations

Labour, by common consent, is winning the battle of ideas. Even as shadow chancellor John McDonnell’s plans for reshaping British capitalism were being dismissed as a regression to statism and trade union power, his critics were bemoaning that the Tories’ response was either a pale imitation of the same or a reheated and tired Thatcherism. Worse for his critics, McDonnell was winning a hearing because he spoke to widely held concerns about the economy.

Suddenly, the economic debate has broken out of the ascendancy of variants of Thatcherism. As an advocate of stakeholder capitalism for more than 20 years, I was both taken aback and pleased to find McDonnell praising the ideas on the Today programme – and just as taken aback that some Tories want to develop their own version.

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