Machin's lesson for Labour: M&S boss is right to raise the alarm over price cap plan, says RUTH SUNDERLAND

Labour’s idea of controls on the price of groceries is just the latest manifestation of insanity.

M&S chief executive Stuart Machin pointed out he is making a loss on basic foods including milk, bread and bananas – another good word to describe the idea of a socialist state trying to run supermarkets.

It paints a grim picture of the UK to international investors including German discount grocers Aldi and Lidl, which are big employers here and major supporters of UK farming, which the Government has also hammered.

The implication grocers are profiteering from food inflation is doubly offensive in light of the harm the Government has done.

Hikes in National Insurance Contributions and the National Living Wage, and worker rights reforms are not victimless measures. They inflict real pain on consumers and employees.

Having made his way up from starting at 16 on the shop floor with a Saturday job, this is a cause Machin takes to heart.

Shop work traditionally has been a first job for millions of Britons. Machin called it a ‘great opportunity’.

Whether or not a youngster goes on to work in retail, a Saturday job in a shop teaches skills such as tact, patience and defusing difficult situations that are valuable in any career.

Machin has written a blog for Alan Milburn, who is leading a review into youth unemployment.

The M&S chief wants to work with the Government to help the near-1m youngsters who are not in education, employment or training, known as ‘NEETs’.

Labour should listen to store bosses instead of using them for target practice.

All political parties are guilty of harking back to illusory golden ages, whether John Major’s imagined England of spinsters on bicycles or Nigel Farage’s implicit evocation of roast beef and John Bull.

Labour is stuck in a kaleidoscopic economic time-warp all of its own.

Despite the temporary dip in inflation, there are echoes of the 1970s – stagflation, volatile and insecure energy markets and the prospect of state intervention at a level not contemplated for decades.

The proposed ‘voluntary’ price caps for groceries, as former M&S boss Stuart Rose points out, harks back to the era of Edward Heath and Harold Wilson.

Keir Starmer reached back to the Noughties and further to call on the septuagenarian talents of Harriet Harman and Gordon Brown.

The latter has a serious grasp of economic reality, strong moral principles and may be judged more kindly by history than many contemporaries. But is he the man for the moment?

Andy Burnham wants to wind back the clock on what he calls ‘40 years of neoliberalism’ and renationalise swathes of privatised industry.

He wallows in victimhood over the long-gone Thatcher years and tries to channel the Manchester-cool of the 1990s.

Where are the forward-thinkers to take on the challenges we face now and in the future?

When the economy is confronted by the biggest technological change in generations in the form of AI along with the up-ending of the world order by Donald Trump, living in the past just will not do.

Standard Chartered chief Bill Winters’ attempt to gaslight his way out of trouble for calling his staff ‘lower-value human capital’ has made matters worse.

People can be forgiven for causing offence. Stuart Machin upset idlers recently by saying he didn’t believe in work-life balance.

No sensible person turned a hair, because the M&S boss is plainly not a tyrant, he just works hard and gets results.

Machin’s language yesterday, thanking staff for pitching in, ‘sleeves rolled up’ to overcome a cyber attack could not have been a greater contrast to Winters.

The latter is up there with jeweller Gerald Ratner dissing his products and BP’s Tony Hayward saying he wanted his life back in the middle of a huge oil spill.

It doesn’t wash for exponents of the corporate gaffe to pretend they didn’t really mean what they said when they obviously did.

And how pathetic to trot out the old chestnut of ‘a quote out of context’. Would he or his spin-doctors care to elaborate on which context they think ‘lower-value human capital’ is acceptable?

Alex Brummer is away