There is a richly appropriateness to the mess in which Ed Miliband now finds himself.
Think of it this way.
In 2008 the Credit Crunch brought the giddy spending of the Blair / Brown years to an end. Bankers had found increasingly exotic ways of justifying lending to people who couldn't repay their loans, telling their regulators that they were spreading the risk. In fact they were spreading uncertainty, and when it emerged that some people really couldn't pay back, the banks drew in their horns like a snail catching the first whiff of salt. Capital flows dried up and so did economic activity. This problem, arising first in the US, swiftly spread over here and we saw queues outside Northern Rock.
The obvious conclusion from this - that had the bankers behaved properly the spending spree of the 2000s would have come to an end far sooner - was lost on the Left, which preferred to blame the bankers without asking what it was they had actually been doing (lending us all money).
A further conclusion - that a country which is borrowing £150 billion per year just to stay afloat needs to make some spending cuts - was also fiercely resisted. It suited Labour to blame George Osborne for austerity (despite the fact that overall government spending was actually still going up) because to acknowledge he might have been right would have been to invite speculation about the future of social democracy itself.
After all, if your raison d'etre is to spend more money to solve society's problems, it is rather awkward if it looks as if you can't even afford the spending you're doing at the moment, let alone the spending you say you'll do once you get re-elected. So Labour carried on banging away at Osborne, and it went quite well for them until it turned out we hadn't had a double dip recession after all, let alone a triple dip. The fact that with the economy growing at 3% we are still running a deficit of about £2 bn every week rather bears out Osborne's view of things: even as the good times look like returning we are still running at a massive loss in the UK.
Labour's failure to explain the stark consequences of 2008 to its supporters (and even its most educated supporters can hardly bring themselves to look at the financial pages, feeling that businessmen are on the whole either City fatcats in red braces snorting cocaine, or tedious people with Birmingham accents involved in the manufacture of widgets), has nowhere been more evident than in the West of Scotland. Finding after the first debate with Alastair Darling that Yes was still way behind in the polls, Alex Salmond tried a new tack - he linked the possibility of iScotland with the creation of a new, fairer progressive society. This wasn't what Salmond himself wanted, and he knew full well that it wouldn't be affordable, but needs must when the devil drives and Salmond was in a fix.
To give credit to his shameless ingenuity it worked like a dream. Labour voters in the party's post-industrial heartlands went over to Yes in droves, and the pro-Indepence faction ironically did better in Labour strongholds of the Clyde valley than it did in its own SNP heartlands (which, without exception, voted No).
But the revelation that the massed ranks of Labour supporters in Scotland's most densely populated areas were switching to Yes so panicked the No campaign that they mobilised the Great Clunking Fist of Gordon Brown, brought blinking into the light like a long-interred Golem, bearing his new promises of extra powers plus retention of the Barnett Formula. And these promises in turn enabled David Cameron to make his own pledge of solving once and for all the West Lothian question, the issue of English votes for English laws.
Ed Miliband's opportunist criticism of George Osborne's economic policy together with his failure to educate his own supporters of the new realities of life post-2008 has in fact come round in a great arc and struck him on the head. It will now be a miracle if Labour can escape the consequences of its own short-termism. What goes around comes around.
