THE new test for Labour’s policy-lite leadership lies in its response to Rishi Sunak’s potpourri of policies outlined today at the Tory conference in Manchester.

A sure-footed prime-minister-in-waiting would seize on the most regressive of Sunak’s schemes and simply say that if initiated they will be cancelled. And, if desirable, the scheme will be reinstated.

Let us see.

This Tory conference, with its half-empty hall, fractious fringe, lacklustre platform performances and stage-managed applause is a sign that this is a political party that has run out of road.

The temptation is always to seek explanations for the collapse of a political project in the personalities involved. And it is apparent that many of the people at the top of the Tory Party have little regard for each other. But for the main party of capitalist continuity to lose the plot so comprehensively speaks to a more serious condition than the unfortunate collision of intemperate personalities.

The root of the Tory political crisis, and the crisis of government generally, lies in the deepening problems of the world’s capitalist economies: political crisis combined with governmental stasis is beginning to look like the default setting for bourgeois democracies.

While we were looking at the car crash of a conference in Manchester, the machinery of US government was grinding to a halt.

The Speaker of the House has been voted out. Congress is now in the middle of a political crisis that reflects irreconcilable divisions in both parties of big capital.

The proximate cause lies in the working out of the Republican Party’s internal crisis as it struggles to find a way out of the wreckage that the Trumpian siege of the Capitol building has left.

The Democrats have tried to represent this chaotic circus as a coup against the American people.

There is no state apparatus more accustomed to finessing the mechanics of a coup than the US. History is replete with coups manufactured in Washington. The Capitol carnival was not a serious attempt to grasp the levers of state power but pure political theatre.

The fallout is a Republican Party riven by internal conflict. An element has grasped the simple truth that the system of government in which the two parties of bourgeois power alternate is threatened by the failure of the old Republican Establishment to deal with Trump’s appeal over their heads to an electorate increasingly detached from the capitalist consensus.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy fell victim to the raw power that the Trump tendency exercises in Congress precisely because he tried to find common ground with the Democrats in order to keep the federal government fully funded rather than risk the shutdown that the irreconcilable divisions between and within the parties threaten.

The root of this government funding dispute has remarkable similarities with the disputes on show in Manchester with a Tory rump keen for tax cuts and cutting government spending. 

The crisis in Congress will reappear next month unless the Republicans can find agreement on a new leader and a consensus on government finances.

Governments on both sides of the Atlantic find themselves caught on the horns of a traditional dilemma. In giving effect to their instinct to reduce public spending and cut corporate taxes they need to factor in the probable response of the millions of working people who derive their living from wages, pensions and benefits rather than rent, interest and profits.

We are in a period when the character of the capitalist crisis will shape the working-class response.

As someone once said, divisions in the ruling class are always an opportunity for the working class.