The one company Labour’s proposed “Cadbury Law” would not have protected was Cadbury. Despite the French protection of their yoghurt industry, saving a chocolate company cannot be considered to be in the national interest.

But whatever name it was given, the proposals on takeovers in the party’s election manifesto threaten to disrupt takeovers by raising the barrier for acceptance.

It proposes a national interest test of takeovers but restricts it to utility companies and infrastructure assets. Now that ICI, most power and water companies and the steel industry have been bought by foreign interests, that may seem like a stable door being slammed after the horse has bolted, but – in theory at least – it is not overseas ownership Labour is trying to block but inappropriate ownership. And that is hard to define, even if it is a highly-geared private-equity fund with no experience of the industry it is buying.

Anyway, it is impossible legally to block a bid by an EU buyer for a UK company. All the golden shares in privatised industries have been scrapped except at BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce and Qinetic and it would be unfair to foist them onto non-state firms.

In fact controls on buyers of infrastructure assets might most hurt a Labour government: the party intends to sell such assets to fund its green investment bank.

But where Cadbury might have been affected is from Labour’s plan to allow bids to succeed only if two-thirds of shareholders approve, rather than the current 50 per cent. This is a bad proposal. It could mean 65 per cent of investors wanting to sell a company but the board remaining in control and the wish of the majority being overruled.

Labour says there is also a case for examining whether votes should be frozen once a bid is announced, so that only investors holding shares at the start can decide the outcome. This would mean that every share sold by an institution taking profits after the bid would become disenfranchised.

If enough investors sell, a company could have enough shares in this voteless limbo to secure its independence. Or the sellers could deliver control to a hard core of investors with partisan interests.

At companies with both voting and non-voting shares, the former trade at a premium to reflect their influence. Would such a two-tier market develop during bids, with shares sold during the offer period trading at a discount? And if the bidder buys shares, would they be excluded from the count too?

The Takeover Panel initiated a consultation on erecting such barriers following comments by Cadbury’s former chairman and the business secretary. Despite the manifesto pledge to change the law, the Panel should reject any changes that stop treating all equity equally.

Labour’s proposals are protectionist. At the micro level they protect bad management from bids that might make companies efficient; at the macro level they try to protect UK companies from foreign offers. If Britain becomes protectionist, other countries will follow, and that would have prevented a lot of UK companies from expanding abroad – include Cadbury.

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