Whatever Mr Prescott says, Mr Brown, who freed the Bank of England and famously married prudence, sees himself as an inventor of New Labour economics and will not lightly abandon either the economic respectability that this has earned for the government, or the personal reputation it has earned for him.

ECONOMIST: Politics

On Friday, Wolfgang Clement, Germany's minister for economics and labour, claimed that this measure alone would cut unemployment by as much as 20%.

ECONOMIST: From third way to Thatcherism

As Labour's espousal of market economics has shown, stealing the other party's clothes can be a successful strategy.

ECONOMIST: British politics

New Labour's ideological accommodations with free-market economics were tolerated by many in the party only because it was a winning creed.

ECONOMIST: The trade unions are not as fearsome as they look

Edmund Phelps, winner of the 2006 Nobel prize for economics for his work on savings and labour markets, argues that the structural explanation for Europe's slower growth rates masks deeper problems with dynamism.

ECONOMIST: Why can't Europe's economies catch up with America?

Yet surely the brute power of economics, sucking women into 19th-century labour forces, must have played its part?

ECONOMIST: It took most of the past ten centuries. Here��s why

It could be Catholic guilt, or lingering Marxism (economics textbooks teach pupils about the conflict between capital and labour).

ECONOMIST: Charlemagne

Though he hated laissez- faire economics and the profit motive, and though he believed passionately in the dignity of labour, he was not a left-wing radical, instead holding a romantically traditionalist, organically hierarchical view of society.

ECONOMIST: Art history

On 15 May 2012, as MPs continued debating the Queen's Speech, focusing on foreign affairs and international development, the Labour spokesman accused ministers of complacency in the face of the current "profound reordering of geo-economics and potentially geo-politics".

BBC: Alexander lambasts 'imperial delusion' of coalition