Syriza’s emphatic victory in the Greek general election last week has seen many British left wing politicians and commentators embark on a series of gruesome little personal victory laps, as though the outcome of a vote in that small Mediterranean country represents some kind of teaching moment for the sixth largest economy in the world.

These delusions have generally taken one of two forms: either the hubristic belief that Syriza’s electoral success somehow lays bare the inherent shortcomings of capitalism in general, or that the installation of Alexis Tsipras as Greece’s new prime minister represents some long-awaited turning point in the fortunes of the European political left. Both of these exercises in wishful thinking are just plain wrong.

The leftists just about have a point, so long as one is content to think very simplistically and superficially about an urgent, festering problem. This line of argument basically says “Austerity is bad, and now that a strongly anti-austerity party has achieved electoral success elsewhere in Europe, all of our arguments in favour of increasing government spending levels forever have been vindicated”.

There is no shortage of this pound shop pseudo-intellectual grandstanding on display at the moment, from many of the usual suspects in the Labour Party and their sympathisers in the media. The Times of London reports:

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