THE golden rule of working-class politics is watch what the class enemy is doing.
This is a more complex task than simply monitoring the Conservative Party in government but nevertheless necessary.
PM Rishi Sunak appears more and more as a stop-gap Tory leader whose initial popularity buzz followed from his boost to business and personal incomes when, as chancellor of the Exchequer, he made big bucks available (as governments are able) during the Covid crisis.
But look back on the most recent government changes — all on the Tory watch.
Boris Johnson got elected with working-class voters defecting from Labour, prompted by the sabotage of Labour’s principled position to respect the Brexit vote in which Keir Starmer’s adhesion to the Trilateral Commission was but a coincidence.
When Tory MPs eventually got round to dumping Johnson he had already recalibrated Britain’s relationship with the EU and tied Britain even further into the US hegemonic project to subordinate Europe to US war aims and its long-term policy of containing China’s challenge to a unipolar world.
Note that in the intervening period the joint imperialist operation in Afghanistan resulted in a further humbling of the empire.
In the midst of an austerity era compounded by a cost-of-living crisis, a squeeze on incomes and a ruling class refusal to make any concessions on public service pay, the appointment of an impossibly rich man as prime minister seems counterintuitive.
It only made fleeting sense when seen against the damage the bond markets did to Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s bid to jump-start an ailing economy with their unsanctioned experiments.
The way in which the Bank of England and the international money markets simply subverted the economic policies of the Truss leadership that an ageing cohort of Tory Party members had imposed on the country tells us a lot about how real power is exercised in what is nominally a parliamentary democracy.
This is simply the routine of the standard procedures that prevail in a capitalist market system.
Sunak is, in this sense, the oily rag of a ruling-class imperative to keep the machine running.
In this role he will likely be replaced by that reliable instrument of the capitalist state, Sir Keir Starmer, unless, and only unless, the Tory Party fully regains the confidence of our ruling elites.
It is not entirely beyond the capacity of the present Labour leadership that they may so blur the distinction between current government policies and what they propose that enough electors will fail to see why a change is necessary.
In the book and later film The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the fictional representative of Sicily’s landowning class, gave voice to the strategy of the ruling classes when faced with the challenges of Italy’s 1861 unification: “If we want everything to remain as it is, everything must change.”
In the social disintegration of Britain the strategy of Labour’s present leadership can be summed up as with a new working of this theme: “In order for things to stay the same nothing much must change.”
Not manifestly an election winner, and it allows the Tories to find a policy niche a smidgeon to the left of Labour.
Maybe child benefit for more than two children, possibly a tweak in emissions policy, a marginal change on incomes policy or tax rates. Starmer has bequeathed Sunak a broad canvas to work on and simultaneously boxed himself in to Tory policies.
