Why Labour's current disarray is ultimately the consequence of Osborne’s austerity

I want to expand on a footnote to last week’s post. As I said there, we now have clear evidence that austerity from 2010 onwards helped fuel right wing populism, Brexit and Farage. However, that post argued that right wing populism would have emerged anyway, because its fundamental cause was a trend towards ending elite taboos on the right against appealing to xenophobic and racist voters which we see across the world. So austerity just helped populism arrive more quickly and, with Brexit, more dramatically. In contrast I do think a lot of the problems we see in the UK Labour party today stem from Osborne's successful devastation of public services, and it is less clear they would have happened anyway. A Conservative cutting public services to numbers way below what the public were comfortable with should have been a gift to Labour of course. So I think the story of how it turned out otherwise is worth spelling out. It is easy to forget how almost universal the belief was in the UK…