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The man who sits across from me on the red leather couch speaks in a Scouse drawl usually heard among the ranks of the Labour Party, not the chiselled Oxbridge accents of the Tory elite, and he has a louche, rumpled appearance that seems more polytechnic than ruling class.

But it is when Phillip Blond speaks that his novelty is most apparent.

“Free-market neoliberalism has created a tiny elite and turned the working class into losers with no power to control their lives – what they call the free market is actually covert capture by monopolies,” he tells me, followed by: “Monopoly capitalism has atomized us into a society of lonely consumers isolated from a big, monolithic, uncaring state.”

We are, he...