Andy Burnham has promised to bring “four decades of neoliberalism” to an end. The first serious test of that pledge was always going to be the cabinet he appointed. The red flags are impossible to ignore.

Ending neoliberalism would mean putting privatised services back into public hands, unleashing public investment and using the power of the state to reshape the economy. Yet Burnham’s support for the government’s suffocating fiscal rules – and his preference for the vaguer language of “public control” over public ownership – had already raised doubts about how far he was prepared to go.

Had he truly meant it, Ed Miliband would have been the obvious choice for chancellor. The former Labour leader has been on a political journey since concluding that his defeat in the 2015 general election was partly the consequence of insufficient radicalism. “I felt my analysis was big,” he later said, “but my response was not big enough, not bold enough.”

As energy secretary, Miliband was the one cabinet minister who combined dynamism with a genuine determination to challenge the status quo. His record included the establishment of the publicly owned Great British Energy, the return of energy-system planning to public hands and an interventionist industrial policy.

He would also have been prepared to confront Treasury resistance to transformative economic policies. This is, after all, a government bureaucracy with much to answer for in Britain’s long economic decline. Its record stretches back to the 1970s, when excessively pessimistic projections of the country’s borrowing requirements helped precipitate the notorious International Monetary Fund bailout and the avoidable public sector cuts that followed.

Yet Burnham seems to have folded in the face of a loud and very public campaign against Miliband’s appointment, centred on........

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