Must-Read: Paul Krugman: Labour’s Dead Center

Must-Read: Paul Krugman: Labour’s Dead Center: “One crucial piece of background to the Corbyn surge…

…the implosion of Labour’s moderates…. Every candidate other than Mr. Corbyn essentially supported the Conservative government’s austerity policies…. accepted the bogus justification… pleading guilty to policy crimes that Labour did not, in fact, commit….

Was the last Labour government fiscally irresponsible?… On the eve of the economic crisis of 2008… debt was lower, as a share of G.D.P., than it had been when Labour took office a decade earlier, and was lower than in any other major advanced economy except Canada…. There has never been any hint that investors, as opposed to politicians, were worried about Britain’s solvency: interest rates on British debt have stayed very low…. There was never any need for a sharp turn to austerity…. The whole narrative about Labour’s culpability for the economic crisis and the urgency of austerity is nonsense… consistently reported by British media as fact.

And all of Mr. Corbyn’s rivals for Labour leadership bought fully into [it]… accepting the Conservative case that their party did a terrible job…. Why Labour’s moderates have been so hapless. Consider the contrast with the United States…. Part of the answer is that the U.S. news media haven’t been as committed to fiscal fantasies, although that just pushes the question back a step. Beyond that, however, Labour’s political establishment seems to lack all conviction…