Impeccable history of the free market – and from the BBC too

The launch of Radio 4’s Invisible Hands series has been both blessed and cursed by timing. It tells the story of Britain’s ‘free market revolution’, just as President Donald Trump overhauls the free trade consensus of the past 40 years and world leaders grapple with how to respond. The problem is the hypotheticals posed at the start of the first episode – that free market capitalism ‘might be in crisis’; that ‘the global free market might be under threat’ – are already out of date.