The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what-works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.

It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual [immaturity and] - through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of others - a kind of synthetic evil.

...When I asked the CBI for their thoughts on the new economics, there was a week-long silence, and then, after I chased them, a terse statement: “Labour seems determined to impose rules that display a wilful misunderstanding of business.”

The new economists say they are not intimidated. “We in the movement need to be absolutely frank about this,” says Guinan. “A democratic and an exploitative economy are fundamentally incompatible. We should mount a straightforward, left-populist attack on these business interests. We should say to them: ‘Off you go to Singapore!’ The left shouldn’t be afraid of a little creative destruction”, he says, cheekily borrowing a phrase usually used by free-marketeers. Jacobs agrees: “Exploitative companies can go to the wall.”

That might sound like a reckless leftwing fantasy. But the new economists argue convincingly that hugely disruptive change is coming to the British economy, anyway – thanks to Brexit, automation and the climate emergency. “Brexit alone will require a very interventionist state” to help the economy adapt, says Lawrence. “It will make it much harder for a civil servant to say, ‘You simply can’t do that.’”

But what do the new economists want to come after neoliberal capitalism? In Preston, after Brown had spoken evangelically to me about the virtues of “local businesses” and “local jobs”, I asked whether his council was actually saving capitalism in the city – by making it more socially sensitive – rather than supplanting it. For once, he paused. “We’ve got to be pragmatic,” he said. “We are still in a free-market environment. And I don’t see local businesses as big capitalists, anyway. The vast majority only have one or two people working for them. There’s almost no one to exploit. Shareholders are not involved.” Not everyone on the left would see small businesses – often keen supporters of rightwing parties and austere social and economic policies – in such benign terms. But Brown went on: “The Labour party, nationally, is getting away from the old pro-business/anti-business argument. Creating social value is what matters.”

Later I asked McDonnell, too, whether his approach risked saving rather than replacing capitalism. He smiled, and went into the gnomic mode he adopts when talking about tricky issues. “Who incorporates who ...” he said. “That’s the debate!” Then his smile turned more mischievous. A Corbyn government, he said, would “welcome” business “into our warm embrace”.

“As for de-growth” – the current green term for dropping growth as an economic objective – “the Labour party won’t touch it with a bargepole.” McDonnell’s ally agreed. “De-growth,” he said, “is just appalling labelling.” Guinan says the problem is not just presentational: “a politics of de-growth has not yet been invented that will carry the public.”

Instead, Labour have recently begun promoting a version of the Green New Deal: an enticing but still largely theoretical scheme advocated by steadily more leftists and environmentalists in Britain and the US over the past decade. It aims to address the climate emergency and some of capitalism’s problems simultaneously, by a huge increase in government support for green technologies and the highly skilled, hopefully well-paid jobs needed to create them. In a speech this week, McDonnell said that this project needed to be Britain’s biggest peacetime undertaking since the Attlee government’s conversion of the economy from war to peace during the 40s.

More than 20,000 supporters have signed a petition in which they say that Good Omens is “another step to make satanism appear normal, light and acceptable”, and “mocks God’s wisdom”. God, they complain, is “voiced by a woman” – Frances McDormand – the antichrist is a “normal kid” and, most importantly, “this type of video makes light of Truth, Error, Good and Evil, and destroys the barriers of horror that society still has for the devil”. They are calling on Netflix to cancel the show.