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Part of me hates it when the Left takes a step forward. I’ve believed in fairness and decency all my life, and so I’ve been a socialist all my life (regular readers may have noticed). This has condemned me to years of electoral defeats and setbacks, interspersed, very briefly indeed, with triumphs.

For a socialist, success comes mostly away from governmental politics. It comes in small local affairs where, when you talk to people shorn of the orders they are given on the national scene by the establishment and its servant, the media, they find they very much support the ideas of service above profit, fairness above money, health above greed. Somebody who’s waited three weeks for a privatised electricity company to reconnect them after a power failure very quickly signs up to socialist ideals of state ownership. Somebody whose loved one has been denied a breast cancer drug because the NHS cannot afford it very soon changes their view of the unregulated open free market. Somebody who’s lost their home because of an ATOS assessment or a bank foreclosure soon changes their view of so-called paternalistic capitalism.

But now, in the big picture, in Greece, Syriza has gone and won an election, which gladdens the heart of an old leftie like me. But at the same time, it frightens the life out of me: the status quo of the European right, led by the likes of the intellectual pygmy David Cameron daring to insult the democratic wish of the Greek people, will now bring the full majesty of its ammunition to bear in order to protect its free market and the beneficiaries thereof, the rich.

It is an awesome array of ammunition that will shortly be fired at Greece. We in this country know all about it. We have seen what happens when the full weight of the free market’s vested interests is allied to the institutions of government. The consequences of the argument between putting decently-paid jobs for working people above the profit and power of their employers laid waste half of our country.

I imagine few watched Jacques Peretti’s BBC2 programme The Super-Rich and Us over the last couple of weeks, but those who did will have had their jaws on the ground at as damning a condemnation as it is possible to imagine of the unregulated free market, the inequality on which it depends, and the damage it has done to us. Nobody who watched it could ever again take seriously what the Left has always known to be the nonsensical lie of ‘trickle-down economics’.

But today, we still pay the price of bovine obedience, of listening politely to the Conservatives and the businessmen, the rich and the powerful: our public services are mired in greed and squalor. Our health system turns away sick people because the price of their treatment is too high; sick mentally ill people are incarcerated in police cells because we have nowhere to treat them; our education system is being taken out of democratic control and handed over to private business and corporate sponsorship in academies and free schools; our infrastructure is parcelled up in so-called free-market contracts to unaccountable behemoths like Serco and Capita so the wealthy friends of our government can benefit; the elderly are abused in their so-called ‘care’ homes; the disabled are hounded to the point of suicide by the Government’s welfare assessments; the lack of opportunity has created an uneducated under-class; it has even driven the hard of brain into the arms of terrorists. We still cling to the great social institutions the Left won for us – the NHS, holidays, pensions, help for those in need, education, weekends – and they still do great good, often for people who deny the achievements of socialism. But certainly, our adherence to the status quo has cost us very dear indeed.

Is this what awaits Greece once the European banks and conservatives have launched their attack on Syriza? When the Greeks are brow-beaten into submission to the tender mercies of the market, as we have been, as they were once before?

Perhaps not. Perhaps the Greeks have suffered so much more than us that they will never return to unregulated free-market capitalism. Perhaps Owen Jones is right, in today’s Guardian. As cogently as ever, he analysed the fate of the Left since the 1980s: “Deprived of any organised ideological counterweight, capitalism was liberated to chip away at all the constraints that had been placed upon it: like nationalisation, progressive taxation, workers’ rights, social security and regulation. The culmination of this hubris was the financial collapse, as triumphant free-market capitalism went into meltdown. But the left did not exist as a viable mass political force in the west: its battered remnants could get together a few placards complaining about the bankers, but it had no coherent alternative to offer.”

And then he provocatively insists: “Syriza’s victory is the biggest challenge to the era of ‘There Is No Alternative’ yet. Syriza are presented as ‘far left’, while those they replace are presumably ‘moderates’. It is a fascinating insight into what the western media regard as moderation: plunging over half of young people into unemployment, almost doubling child poverty, stripping away basic social protections. The politics of despair peddled by elites mean you are supposed to regard such injustices as inevitable, irresistible, impossible to overcome. But the re-emergence of the left as a political force – at least offering the possibility of a different sort of society – represents a substantial punch in the face to an economic order that has prevailed for a generation.”

Is this the sort of punch in the face we can see in the Green surge in this country, as more and more people embrace the radical policies of fairness that the Labour Party has long since abandoned, to its shame?

I don’t know. I do know these are stirring times. I do hope the Greek voters who supported Syriza are strong enough to hold the line once the big guns of Europe turn upon them. I do hope Owen is right, that change is in the wind. Hope is what I’ve had all my life.