Ed Miliband, a candidate for the UK Labour leadership, recently remarked: “I hate what David Cameron is doing to this country.” I sometimes feel the same way, but I suspect for very different reasons.

The academic name for the economic policy into which the British prime minister has stumbled is “mercantilism”. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, this is “the economic theory and practice common in Europe from the 16th to the 18th centuries that promoted government regulation of a nation’s economy for the purpose of augmenting state power at the expense of rival national powers”. Among its doctrines was that the trade balance must be favourable, meaning an excess of exports over imports. Of course, mercantilist thinking has moved on since the 18th century. Instead of coveting gold and silver, modern mercantilist politicians talk of promoting employment. But there are many common threads between the old and the new mercantilism. One of them is the identification of the national interest with that of chosen national corporations, even though we are not allowed to talk of “picking winners”. The modern version is sometimes called corporatism. The economist David Henderson once called it “do-it-yourself economics”, while I preferred “businessmen’s economics”.

But I now think the best name is “beggar-my-neighbour” economics. This was coined by the leftwing Cambridge economist Joan Robinson – no market fundamentalist she. By this she meant that because governments were unwilling or unable to promote output and employment by domestic means they had to resort to trying to promote it at the expense of other countries.