Politics isn't a continuum from left to right. It's slightly more complicated than that. It really breaks into two sections, the socialist left and everything else. Everything else is a version of itself, more or less extreme, from RW Lab through to RW Con. That's a continuum. 1
The socialist left, though, isn't a version of this, it's a direct challenge to it. Rejecting the neoliberal economic dogmas of the centre and right, its economics are wholly different. The two attempt to co-exist within the Labour Party, but the discontinuity is obvious. 2
This is one of the fracture lines thrown up by the smearing war: not just one version of something versus another version of the same thing, but two competing visions of the world, of the economy, of how things actually work. 3
The smearing war was, and is, to some extent, a proxy war, camouflage for a policy debate which hasn't happened, about the economy, 'borrowing' and what it means, what we can 'afford' and what we can't. 4
'The Magic Money Tree' line is trotted out by RW Labour MPs as easily as when Theresa May said it, and there is no difference between the two. The pernicious myth of 'tax-payers' money' is wheeled out to defend cuts. RW Lab and Con believe the same thing about this.
The Socialist left has a different approach altogether, one based on the reality that government spending generates wealth, that 'National Debt' is (largely) just 'public savings' in drag; that money is a measure and not a resource.
These are incompatible and mutually exclusive views of the world, and they can co-exist only precariously, if at all. The smearing war successfully cloaked this debate so that it wouldn't happen, so that business-as-usual economics would continue. Cons would have done the same.
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