Right has lost the argument

In their millions the people of Europe are rejecting this capitalist retrenchment strategy and it's not at all surprising - because there is absolutely no excuse for it.

The free market has emerged as a grotesque failure. Its freedom only allows the rich the exclusive control of capital and the chance to withhold it if they don't feel that investment is in their private interests. And to describe it as a market is a total misnomer. No-one's buying.

The people of Europe are now running out of the capacity to suspend their disbelief.

In Greece, the political elite are in a bind they just can't get out of.

The pro-austerity parties - New Democracy and the pseudo-socialist Pasok - can't set up a pro-European Union coalition.

And the anti-austerity Syriza Party quite reasonably won't join a coalition dedicated to wringing the working class dry with punitive "rescues" which totally contradict its raison d'etre.

In France, the electorate has moved from the Sarkozy regime to the gentler pleasures of Francois Hollande - although quite what this will acheve is unclear.

Nevertheless it has potentially driven a wedge between the right-wing certainties of the "Merkozy" Franco-German alliance.

Ireland is in the dismal throes of a vicious IMF-dictated retrenchment and the proponents of austerity are holding their breath.

They fear quite rightly that the coming May 31 referendum on the EU fiscal treaty will give a bruised and impoverished Irish electorate a chance to deliver a bloody nose to the Brussels econocrats.

In Spain, the crisis is ripening fast. Troubled Spanish speculator Bankia is to be partly nationalised to bail it out of troubles caused by speculation, giving the state a 45 per cent stake in the bank. Unemployment has hit 5.6 million, a rate of around 25 per cent.

The government has cut back on severance pay and restricted inflation-linked salary increases but this has angered the unions, which have organised widespread general strikes in protest.

In Portugal, unemployment has hit 14 per cent, a rise from 3.7 per cent in 2000.

On February 11 more than 300,000 workers turned out in Lisbon to protest against government policies.

Even in Germany, the heartland of EU austerity, Chancellor Angela Merkel isn't having it her own way.

A week ago, Ms Merkel's Christian Democrats and the Free Democrats - the parties that make up the national government - lost power in Schleswig-Holstein.

In elections on Sunday, the Social Democrats and Greens won combined support of 50.4 per cent in elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, inflicting a humiliating defeat on Ms Merkel.

Support for her party plunged to 26.3 per cent from 34.6 per cent in 2010, its worst showing in the state since 1945.

All over Europe the pernicious policies of austerity are being rejected.

The time is right to move on from the limp responses of Labour, the "not-so-hard and not-so-deep" school of opposition to austerity by dilution.

Let's make a full-bodied demand for nationalisation, for control of the banks and the great utilities.

The austere and the avaricious have no answers. We have, so let's make them plain.

And let's start with a loud-and-clear demand for the renationalisation of the rail industry and a clearout of the profiteers and freeloaders from the sector.

The time is right. We have the policies, so let's argue for them.