Syriza’s thumping win in Greece on an anti-austerity ticket should be a wake-up call, not just to the Brussels establishment, but to governments and opposition parties right across Europe, including Britain’s.

The almost wanton destruction of Greek society produced by the EU austerity programme triggered a popular revolt. It also did not work in its own narrow terms: Greek national debt went up, not down—which was the stated purpose of the truly savage cuts imposed.

Nobody in the political establishment seems to have been aware of J. M. Keynes’s seminal The Economic Consequences of The Peace, on the 1919 Treaty of Versailles which imposed crippling reparation—viz “austerity” in modern parlance—conditions on Germany. He argued compellingly this wouldn’t work. And it didn’t—to disastrous effect.

Yet where conservative parties have cheered on such austerity, mainstream centre-left parties have struggled to offer a convincing ideological critique of this agenda following the 2008 global banking crisis.

They have slipstreamed the centre-right and right-wing parties, heading down the same austerity road at a slower pace, instead of (as Keynes showed in the 1930s) getting the economy back on the growth path as a much surer, and much less damaging, way of sorting out the public finances.

Although the neoliberal ideology which took root under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan from 1979-80 led to the banking crisis, that same ideology has clung on nevertheless. Today the “Westminster Bubble” of politicians, journalists and broadcasters throttles attempts to argue for alternatives.

Showing breathtaking chutzpah, Tories and other neoliberal advocates have even insisted that the entire global banking crash had less to do with Big Finance than with Big Government. The cause was too much public spending by the last Labour government—not too little public regulation.

And that, even after David Cameron and George Osborne in September 2007 publicly backed Labour’s spending plans and pledged to maintain them until beyond the 2010 election. Of course after the banking crisis they switched to denounce this very spending as the root of all economic evil: the big deceit of British politics. Both…

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