I've been pointing out for five years that the credit crunch is a much more serious problem for the Left than the Right, and there are a couple of signs today that late risers are at last beginning to smell the coffee.
Firstly, the Grauniad reports today Ed Balls's speech to the effect that under the next Labour government the most affluent pensioners won't get the winter fuel payments any more. This reform is long overdue, and it shows a dawning acknowledgment that future governments really are going to have to cut spending.
Secondly, the paper has a wonderful quote from the Institute of Public Policy Research, the Left-leaning think-tank, whose director Nick Pearce writes, "The challenge for Labour is to assemble an alternative social democratic strategy that better controls costs".
It's been obvious since about 2009 that the boom in UK government spending had been largely built on the state taking on more debt, and on the tax revenues generated by consumer debt. All the credit crunch did was demonstrate the truth of the maxim that What Can't Go On Forever Must Stop.
The consequences for social democracy, as the IPPR seem at last to be recognising, are devastating. Social democracy's big idea is that the state will spend the large sums of money required to support people who need supporting. What's immediately obvious from the 1997/2010 record however is that the UK government could not afford its public spending commitments even though its course almost exactly coincided with the longest period of economic growth in British history (1993-2008).
If public spending was unaffordable during the very best of economic good times, my reasoning goes, it isn't going to be affordable in the more straitened times to come. That's why I've been boring friends and family for years with the proposition that social democracy as we have known and sometimes loved it is in very deep trouble.
So when an IPPR director says Labour must "assemble an alternative social democratic strategy that better controls costs" it is a cherishable "no really" moment for those of us in the reality-based community.
You have to hand it to Ed Balls. No one else in British politics could possibly utter his line about "iron financial discipline" - this from Gordon Brown's chief lieutenant - and maintain a straight face.
His winter fuel payment cut will save about £100 million, it is calculated. The UK's projected deficit for 2013-14 is close to £120 billion.
Deckchairs. Titanic.
