WHEN there is a kerfuffle about a prime minister the Westminster bubble and the trivial media inflate themselves in momentary euphoria, while almost universally misreading the messages.

Actually the Tory Party doesn’t do personality or identity politics. That’s one of the reasons it is the most successful right-wing party in the world — it clings on through thick and thin because it makes a virtue out of pragmatism and abandons every principle except the defence of capital.

They won the last election because they had the bottle to reflect the democratic will of the people in the referendum. Get Brexit Done was a representative, popular and necessary slogan.

They then had to deal with an attempted coup against the referendum result by Parliament itself, aided and abetted by the Supreme Court. They then had to get a deal with the vicious and unreasonable EU.

Following success on these fronts their mandate was over.

Then along came Covid and the neoliberal, market-driven system they had put into place could not cope, so the government had to resurrect state intervention, science, planning and public expenditure and reject the very essence of neoliberalism in order to survive a pandemic.

Capitalism was so unable to cope that the Tories had to concede that the state would pay the wages of workers in 1.9 million enterprises which would have gone bust otherwise. 

If ever you needed an example of the fragility of capitalism and strength of the state and trade unions, that was it.

Government debt inevitably soared through the roof to its highest ever levels of £2 trillion with £48 billion a year being paid in interest alone. 

So the conventional means of borrowing from the private banks to make the state even more indebted to the City of London were used again.

The private financial institutions consolidated their power over national and personal debt. 

A section of the Tory Party recognised that various elements of state-led planning and public expenditure were needed to deal with key aspects of reconstruction following the pandemic and the newly found independence of the country.

The capitalists keen to exploit a national crisis pocketed handsomely from many dodgy government deals during Covid and then started to help themselves by way of more profits and increasing essential prices as we emerged from the worst. 

The basics of life — food, housing and energy — rocketed. This naturally started to generate what is called inflation which became increasingly lucrative for them and increasingly desperate for us.

We produce so little relatively of what we need in Britain that prices are bound to go up, there simply is not enough being supplied of what we want and need.

Then unions started to say enough is enough and the mood has changed. There was a recognition that we had to fight for pay again and also for a new economic and social settlement.

Blaming workers’ wages for inflation just didn’t work. Nor did the old adage that privatisation and deregulated banks would make life fairer, society more equal and all of us richer.

All the bunkum they have spouted for 40 years has started to visibly fade away. 

A bumbling Prime Minister could no longer be trusted to challenge this new mood and social movement on behalf of capital. Fortunately for them he made some unseemly errors of judgment that enabled the hardliners to pounce.

And they pounced. 

But a challenge now faces us on our side. It is clear that even if they hang on with the large parliamentary majority for a couple of years, which they will, then the next general election will be quite a moment.

They will have by then girded their loins through a lethal brew of more warmongering and anti-Chinese sentiment and staring the unions out in struggle, or we will have got our act together on challenging the central planks of the failed economic policies which have dominated since 1979.

We can’t continue just to oppose the consequences of their voodoo economics. We’ve got to stop the main thrust of it.

They released a wave of deregulation of the banks which allowed our wealth to flow out of the country without constraint.

They privatised everything they could and sold off major state assets.

They lauded the virtues of “loadsamoney” and selfishness over manufacturing and public service.

They put the private banking sector in charge of national and personal debt.

They made the basics of life, housing, food, energy, transport, and so on unaffordable.

Our leadership challenge is: when will we put into power in every community organisation, every union and every elected position, those committed to a fundamental reversal of the madness?

Part of the answer lies in refreshing our economic understanding and recognition that the market and private finance lead nowhere. 

We need a reinvigorated state intervention, price controls, controls on the flow of capital, banks to invest in the real economy, control over exchange and interest rates, a rebirth of high-tech, green manufacturing and a Bank of England with a remit in favour of growth and investment under democratic control.

If we ignore the basic building blocks of the economy, we will get more of the same and yet more wretched Tory leaders.