13.10.2022

On borrowed time

Liz Truss’s early downfall seems likely - but offloading her will not resolve the contradictions of the Tory Party, argues Paul Demarty

It is difficult not to see a pattern developing.

The first Tory prime minister in the recent period of uninterrupted succession, David Cameron, managed to last for six years. His successor held it together for three; hers for two and a half. That brings us to the incumbent, the incomparable Liz Truss, who seems in danger of being offloaded within a few months of taking over.

Is this evidence of a secular decline, or merely an accident of history based on (very) small sample sizes? Indeed, it can be argued that it is merely random. The opinion is available that Truss is simply world-historically incompetent; but that must in turn beg the question of how it is possible that the Tories - the very incarnation of ruthless Staatsraison - can have allowed such a creature to capture the reins; how it could have taken a step down from the distracted, self-regarding clown, Boris Johnson, and his grovelling entourage.

We shall have more to say on this later. For now it is worth describing the situation as it stands. Truss’s big coming-out party - the announcement by chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng of a ‘growth package’ comprising more or less entirely of tax cuts for top earners - turned into a total catastrophe. It led to a run on the pound, spiralling yields on government gilts (making debt more expensive to service) and a near collapse of multiple major pension funds - averted only by the Bank of England throwing freshly printed money in ever greater volume at the problem. Britain was in a situation, as remarked by one German official, of the government stamping on the accelerator and the bank pulling the handbrake at the same time. All this was happening as the Tory conference opened for business.

The most egregiously unpopular of the tax cuts were then abandoned (although Truss and Kwarteng promise they will be back as soon as they can sneak them under the noses of the International Monetary Fund and the hive-mind of institutional investors). But Conservative MPs and activists arrived in Birmingham with UK government bonds still well into junk territory, and Labour enjoying the kind of poll lead normally reserved for the official party of some tin-pot dictator who still goes through the motions of calling elections. Morale was not, unsurprisingly, at historic highs.

The U-turn came on October 3 - by the next day, home secretary and all-round swivel-eyed loon Suella Braverman was openly denouncing it as a coup. Braverman thus positioned herself as Truss’s praetorian guard. The ‘coup’ accusation was in turn denounced by trade secretary (and all-round swivel-eyed loon) Kemi Badenoch. Backstage mutterings picked up by lobby journalists had the general shape of regicidal conspiracy: there was talk of using Michael Gove as the front man for a defenestration somehow, but his long and almost admirable career of relentless backstabbing has caught up with him and he is probably not in a position to deliver.

With all this swirling around, Truss put on her best ‘lady’s not for turning’ schtick in the closing keynote. Most of the big beasts had already departed, in order to avoid getting caught up in rail strikes, and the hall was packed with local activists who were ‘induced’, one way or another, to attend. “Growth, growth, growth,” Truss declaimed; she was the victim of an “anti-growth coalition”; and so on, and so on.

Can she survive, and for how long? There exists the possibility of her learning from her mistakes and emerging, in the next year or two, as a serious political operator. We have seen precious little evidence of it so far, however (though she was once an anti-monarchist, remainer Liberal Democrat, so her politics are at least somewhat mutable). We raise this more or less as a null hypothesis.

Game theory

Supposing she cannot metamorphose into a Thatcher-level stateswoman, and remains merely a Thatcherite without guile, the question becomes one of game theory for her ostensible parliamentary colleagues and potential defenestrators. The rules say that she cannot be offloaded for at least a year following her election, though the rules can always be bent and rewritten if necessary.

To get rid of her in the short term without simply getting Boris back, it will be necessary to carve the Tory membership out of the affair altogether, which will require total agreement on a ‘unity’ candidate among MPs - unlikely, given their bickering and desperation. All this suggests that her short-term survival is most likely. However, that assumes that Tory minds are fully engaged in this game of N-dimensional chess, rather than in a blind panic - their ‘calculations’ may be more like instinctive swerves. All told, we give her a 60% chance of making it to next summer; any number of events, like blackouts over winter (which she has blithely promised will not happen, but are plainly a matter to be settled between Moscow and Langley, Virginia), might tip the Tories into damage-limitation mode.

Certainly the latter seems to be the guiding concern, rather than another electoral triumph. The mood is of decadence and complacency, after 12 years in government. The British press is full of apparently well-connected lobby correspondents - not one of the various Tory sources, so far as I can tell, has so much as hinted that their party might win the next general election. Such an outcome cannot be ruled out, of course - again, events, dear reader, events! - but there are defeats and defeats. The latest projections, as I write, are for Labour to take 375 seats and the Lib Dems 35-odd; add that all up and the Tories will lose more than half their current contingent of MPs, and anyone in an even remotely marginal seat has some interest in reducing the scale of the losses. A relatively competent - or at least undramatic - journey down the home straight of this parliament is probably the best bet.

We get more into the meat of the matter when we ask, ‘If not Truss, then who?’ Certainly not a loyal Trussite, like Braverman or Kwarteng. Not some other ideological fanatic, like Badenoch. But the name being floated around most of all is that of Rishi Sunak. He at least has the look of someone ‘competent’ if you are a pension fund manager, and showed himself to be a more pragmatic sort of Thatcherite during the pandemic. But he was only just recently decisively rejected by the Tory membership, and has many bitter enemies in the parliamentary party, so it is not clear that a ‘coronation’ type transition could be arranged. Beyond that - who?

Function

That gets us to the core contradiction of Tory politics. The function of the Conservative Party is to govern directly in the interests of the British ruling class, and particularly its hegemonic fractions - today, naturally, that means the City of London. But individual finance capitalists do not add up to a sufficiently weighty support base for this to be done transparently. So the Tories carry out that function by representing these class interests to a wider electoral coalition as if they were the interests of those wider layers.

There are both material and ideological components to this process. It is nicer not to have to lie at all, of course; that can be avoided by giving (some) people a limited stake in the status quo. In modern history, and especially since the Thatcher days, it is homeowners and especially petty landlords that are the largest part of the bribed. To keep them happy, house prices can only go in one direction - as Truss might put it: growth, growth, growth!

That, however, puts a ceiling on the number of people who can be bribed this way. Even ever riskier lending on the part of banks cannot push this too far (since in any case that tends to inflate property prices further). Therefore, ideology must play its part too: the Tories have always played at chauvinist mob politics. The victims vary over time - Catholics, Irish, south Asians, Caribbeans, gays and lesbians, traitorous leftists who ‘hate Britain’, Brussels bureaucrats … but the tricks are always basically the same. It was amusing to see many rightwing newspaper columnists protesting the idea that Giorgia Meloni is a fascist on the basis that most of what she says could very well have come from Kemi Badenoch. The lesson is that the Tories are, ideologically, a party of the far right, and always have been.

Much larger layers of society can be won to these banners than can be bribed by petty-bourgeoisification; but the ties are correspondingly thinner. And, since the interests of petty landlords are not identical with the interests of Blackrock and HSBC, never mind the chauvinist politics of the country’s bar-room bores, there is always tension. Though the Tories are not even remotely a democratically organised party, these tensions find expression in different wings of the parliamentary party: it is not a given that the finance-capital wing will play the dominant role, and indeed it is arguable that they have not since David Cameron’s ouster in 2016. Relations have rarely been as bad as they are now. The scale of their victory in 2019 exacerbated the problem by adding the ‘red wall’ to the list of competing interests.

Thus the present predicament. Big capital has turned viciously on the Tories for their insolence; but there is no off-ramp without attacking either the Tory activist base or some section of its electorate. Yet continuing on as they are is no solution either: house prices are set for a very sharp ‘correction’, after all, and the debt-reduction measures now promised by Kwarteng for the end of the month are likely to nix whatever slender threads of Johnson’s ‘levelling up’ agenda still exist; thus Truss and Kwarteng are cornered into attacking the ‘red wall’ and the true-blue shires simultaneously - never mind the fallout if pension funds start collapsing. It will be hard to bury all this under scaremongering about the ‘woke mob’, ‘gender ideology’ and the rest, but they will try. What else can they do?

Many on the left will be tempted to view the Tories’ implosion as a great opportunity, but their weakness does not make us strong. If the worst comes to the worst and an election has to be called, the result looks like being a world-historically rightwing Labour government (if it is not an upset Tory victory). As we argued last week, the narrative is already assembled that Truss’s failures are of fiscal responsibility, competence and what have you - a bad pupil of the International Monetary Fund and Jackson Hole orthodoxy. The Tories are durable: this is not their first crisis, and so long as they give expression to real class forces and contradictions, they will bounce back: eventually.

Next time, let us make sure that it is not Sir Keir Starmer or some such creep who profits.

paul.demarty@weeklyworker.co.uk