The Labour right seem to think the financial crisis is irrelevant. This is the inference we might draw from Chris Leslie's pamphlet, Centre Ground (pdf).

Pretty much the only reference he makes to the crisis is the claim that it "fuelled cynicism about government and politicians". Nowhere doe he even acknowledge the possibility that the crisis might undermine New Labour's thinking about the relationship between the state and capitalism. The crisis - and the subsequent decade-long stagnation in real wages and productivity - shows for me that a stable policy framework is not sufficient for economic stability or growth; that economic growth might need greater state intervention than New Labour offered; that severe recessions can originate not merely from bad economic policy or macroeconomic shocks but from the failure (pdf) of key firms; and that the vast incomes and power of a tiny minority are not benign. In other words, social democrats need to rethink. The great virtue of Corbyn and McDonnell is that they see this.

Leslie, however, does not. Instead, he seems stuck in a 1990s mindset. This, for example, could have been said by Tony Blair in 1997:

It is the precipitous rate of technological development and globalisation that have churned the nature of employment and production, from what were rates of transformation that once occurred inter-generationally to now intra-generational change.

But this doesn't seem to be true. Job-to-job flows are lower than they were before the crisis, suggesting that there's less churn than there used to be. And of course stagnant productivity suggests the rate of technological development is much less than precipitous. The challenge for policy-makers is not to deal with the fall-out from economic dynamism, but to restart that dynamism.

This blindspot to the changed nature of capitalism is not an idiosyncrasy of Leslie's. Only a few weeks ago Ian Austin complained that Corbyn has taken Labour out of the mainstream without even mentioning the crisis, and without even considering the possibility that a changed capitalism requires a changed Labour party.

Herein, though, lies a delightful irony. Although he's oblivious to the nature of post-crisis capitalism, Leslie claims that the centre ground "is grounded in the real world as it is today" and is "focusing on 21st century challenges - not 20th century nostalgia." One of the "core values" of centrism, he says, is "evidence not ideology."

The cognitive dissonance here is astounding.

What does this tell us? It might be corroboration of Karl Pahlman's point, that politicians who claim to be evidence-based in fact have a "hierarchy of knowledge" and evidence that capitalism is dysfunctional comes well down this hierarchy. He writes (pdf):

Not all evidence in the policy process is equal...The types of evidence that are used and valued in the process represent important power dynamics in policymaking...Often, they support the dominant and prevailing ways of thinking about the world, rarely challenging the distribution of power.

I suspect, though, that there's something else. Leslie is playing a common self-serving trick among centrists - of pretending that they are moderate, rational and evidence-based whilst their opponents (on both sides) are unreasonable ideologues. As Leslie says, centrists are "choosing an evidence-based rather than ideologically-driven approach to the world."

This, of course, is a fiction. What you believe and how you believe it are two different things. As I've said, extremism and fanaticism are distinct: you can be a fanatical centrist and (albeit less commonly I fear) a reasonable, sceptical extremist. Centrism is an ideology just like any other. Perhaps if centrists were to realize this they might acquire the self-awareness that is a necessary starting point for engaging intelligently with both Corbynism and capitalism.