Time For the Left to Stage a Comeback?

In Paul Krugman's Friday NYT column, the nobel laureate economist took a broad and deserved swipe at the "Austerians" and what he calls their 1 Percent Solution.

At this point, the austerian position has imploded; not only have its predictions about the real world failed completely, but the academic research invoked to support that position has turned out to be riddled with errors, omissions and dubious statistics. 

Krugman sees a sado-masochistic puritanical penchant at play among the Austerians.

We lived beyond our means, the story goes, and now we’re paying the inevitable price. Economists can explain ad nauseam that this is wrong, that the reason we have mass unemployment isn’t that we spent too much in the past but that we’re spending too little now, and that this problem can and should be solved. No matter; many people have a visceral sense that we sinned and must seek redemption through suffering — and neither economic argument nor the observation that the people now suffering aren’t at all the same people who sinned during the bubble years makes much of a dent. 

Now that austerity, the hellspawn of incestuous mingling of rightwing politics and rightwing economics, has proven itself not only mistaken but horribly destructive, does this offer the Left an opportunity, even a mandate to stand up and reclaim its legitimate place?  Should our New Democrats not be the first to denounce corporatism and return to their labour roots and restore Canada's Left not to mention our democracy?

There is underway now in Britain an instructive debate, a battle for the soul of the Labour Party.   Britain's Trade Union Council has declared war on the "Blairites" within the Labour Party's shadow cabinet.

In The New Statesman, John Pilger shows how Thatcherism survives into today's Labour Party, a cautionary tale for the Canadian party seemingly intent on emulating them.

Geoffrey Howe, a Thatcher minister between 1979 and 1989, said, “Her real triumph was to have transformed not just one party but two, so that when Labour did eventually return, the great bulk of Thatcherism was accepted as irreversible.”

In 1997, Thatcher was the first former prime minister to visit Tony Blair after he entered Downing Street. There is a photo of them, joined in rictus – the budding war criminal with his mentor.
When Ed Miliband, in his unctuous “tribute”, caricatured Thatcher as a “brave” feminist hero whose achievements he personally “honoured”, you knew that she had not died at all.

There are some New Democrats, the old faithful, who feel their own party is being Blairified by the redirection commenced by Jack Layton and now being pursued by Tom Mulcair.  To them their party seems to be jettisoning its longstanding principles to become centrist, doing whatever it takes for a chance at coming to power.

This abandonment of the Left, this shift to the right, comes at a real price to the New Dems, to Parliament, and to the country.  Even in their weakest moments in opposition, such as post '74, the New Democrats stood as the conscience of Parliament.  They were the watchdogs of all to their right, Conservative and Liberal.   Canada, the Canadian people and our Parliament need that conscience today more than ever before only no one is holding down the Left any more.   That position has been vacated, abandoned.

In Canada, organized labour has been under a virulent attack by the Harper government since it first took power.   The Liberals have shown no reason to believe they would restore Canadian labour to its rightful place.  Is this not the moment for the NDP to reclaim the Left in service not only to their constituencies but the country itself?