Our Decadent Tory Elite

As claims making goes, accusing Theresa May of "wrapping a suicide vest around the British constitution and handing the detonator to Michel Barnier" is strong stuff. Then again, in a political economy of, um, politics in which there is a lot happening, you have to do something really attention seeking to command the spotlight for more than five minutes. Even if you're a favoured Westminster personality accustomed to bathing in the media glow. Well, putting his criticism of May's Brexit plan in such crass terms ensured Boris Johnson got the headlines he wanted. What is more interesting is the reaction, which we haven't hitherto seen when he's indulged similar stunts in the past. Tom Tugendhat responded with a description of the scene of an actual suicide bombing while he was on tour in Afghanistan, saying "some need to grow up". More vituperative were Alan Duncan's words: "For Boris to say that the PM’s view is like that of a suicide bomber is too much. This marks one of the most disgusting moments in modern British politics. I’m sorry, but this is the political end of Boris Johnson. If it isn’t now, I will make sure it is later. #neverfittogovern". The Tories have received frequent criticisms here for putting their short-term interests before all else, including the class interests their party articulates and enforces. Is this a case of Johnson jeopardising his medium and long-term leadership prospects for a few talking points on Andrew Marr?

It is worth remembering the Tories are a thoroughly decadent outfit. This isn't a moral condemnation, though immorality clings to them like a reeking miasma. It's an observation. As Marx wrote in the Manifesto, the state is a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie. This is because as a class, business is internally fractured by their competition with one another for markets. Yet they retain interests in common, such as the maintenance of the wage relation, ensuring the value of labour doesn't get too high, an educated, healthy and subservient workforce, and so on. The state's business is ultimately the management of populations so the social arrangements of which it is part do not face an existential challenge and this does, typically, involve compromises with rising strata to try and incorporate and accommodate as many of their interests and aspirations as possible. The Conservative Party for its part, despite its reputation as the natural party of business actually isn't, if you take business and interpret it in neutral, technical terms of economic development and employment. This is secondary to the role proper of the Tories: the prosecution of class struggle on behalf of the class interests it champions. Now, because business is internally divided there is never a straight correspondence between the collective interests of the class as a whole and the policies of their party. Not least become some bourgeois interests have, historically, also found a home in the other parties. Yes, including Labour. This means Tory positions constantly shift and change as alignments and alliances are made and unmade in the drawing rooms, the secret members' clubs, the boardrooms, the garden parties and dinner gatherings, the association meetings and industry-wide lobbies, and the hundreds of other places where they talk and plot. This means at times one or two sections of capital get the upper hand and we see the party push interests that are sectional instead of serving the general good.

Thatcherism is just one example of sectional triumphalism we can take from the party's history, but one that is pertinent to the situation the Tories find themselves in today. Elected as the old post-war consensus collapsed into crisis, in her view the preservation and future prosperity of Britain depended on attacking the organised working class, and imposing labour discipline on a group of upstarts asking for a good hiding. Her chosen method was to privatise or close down as much state owned industry as possible to disorganise and weaken the wider labour movement, while preparing for a set piece confrontation with the miners. In addition to the hardship and misery this caused, it would also - and did - mean letting whole sections of industry go the wall. That is thousands of businesses and a whole section of capital, which is indeed what happened. Manufacturing collapsed, and they found their traditional party turned a tin ear to their concerns. What enabled this to happen was the removal of patrician, 'one nation' Tories from key positions and, as the Thatcher years wore on, their total side-lining and replacement by pugnacious, self-identifying 'self-made' Tories. These were petit bourgeois Tories made good, a nouveau rich unencumbered by ties with the big manufacturing concerns of the post-war years. The old bourgeois types couldn't carry the sort of reaction from above the Thatcher governments presented because they were compromised by formal and informal webs of allegiances, chumminess and business interests. In effect, small, "enterprising" capital did what big capital was unable and unwilling to do. An instance of Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution with petit bourgeois characteristics, you might say. The result? A successful campaign against the labour movement, but an elite coalition lop sided toward other sections of capital - finance (the city), landlords, and (immaterial) labour intensive sectors like hospitality, retail etc. The only manufacturing capital the Tories remained totally on board with was aerospace and arms. This imbalance wasn't so bad as long as the Tories had a mass base feeding into the party, but its decline became sharp under Thatcher and has dwindled ever since. This was crucial because it provided ballast vis a vis the pull of imbalanced elites at the top.

Then came 1997. Nothing could have won that election for the Tories, not even a Labour leader gracing the Cenotaph wearing a donkey jacket. Yet while New Labour proved that Thatcherism was hegemonic when it came to it shared first preference for markets, for regulating labour markets, and privileging finance over making stuff, Blair did render the cause of socialism a valuable service. Yes, you read that right. In as far as he theorised the New Labour project, Blair lamented the splitting of the forces of radicalism, i.e. Labour and the old Liberal Party, at the beginning of the 20th century. New Labour was the inheritor of this, in his view, and he desired it to become the favoured party of government - hence the continual placating of capital and disdain for labour all throughout his (and Gordon Brown's) tenure. Bad news then for labour movement recovery, but bad for the Tories too because it deepened the fracturing of British capital. That is while in their weakened state some capital - the most backward and socially useless sections as it happened - stuck with them, the bulk threw their lot in with Blairism. That is until the crash came along. Gordon Brown saved their system, and they demonstrated their gratitude by abandoning him for Dave's shiny, socially liberal Toryism. Nevertheless the damage was done, Blair had driven a wedge into the organic relationship between that party and its class. The relationship of the latter to the former became more mercenary, conditional, detached and disengaged. And with disastrous consequences.

During the Dave years the shrivelling of the Tories at the top and the bottom started catching up with it. For all Osborne's talk of the long-term economic plan, Dave's liberal Toryism amounted to a doubling down on the Thatcherite settlement in the hope that somehow the hidden hand would become a magic hand and allow the country to bounce back from its 2008 cardiac arrest. In practice we saw more privatisation, a naked assault on the poorest, more tax cuts for the rich, mushrooming foodbank use, more homelessness, a deeply dysfunctional property market and an inauguration of a permanent, highly casualised, low paid, and precarious work force as a significant constituency of workers. Truly a shameful record, even by Tory standards. This was the outcome of the Tories ties to finance as well as the most backward sections of British capital - Osborne's budgets ensured there were plenty of opportunities for profiteering, plenty of opportunities to employ cheap, disorganised labour. This imbalance at the top was matched by imbalance below - the bleeding of the associations left them largely in the hands of the right, which wasn't interrupted by the loss of thousands of activists to UKIP in the wake of the same-sex marriage controversy. In effect, the party input, the elite input and, of course, the press input steered Dave well away from where most of his people were, manifesting in incredibly short-termist policies and, notoriously, the concession of the European Union referendum. It was the diminution of a whole class approach that led Dave down the alley of privileging short-term party interests, the partial disarticulation of the Tories meant the country became a gambling chip in a series of increasingly reckless bets.

As Theresa May was fond of saying in the 2017 general election, nothing has changed. Despite her (initial) one nation rhetoric she has proved as equally decadent and useless. Brexit has exacerbated the Tories' difficulties, but even the correspondence Dave retained with finance and labour intensive business has deserted May. While some sections of capital look on with alienated horror at the madness engulfing their party, others are desperately trying to reverse or water down Brexit. Some are concerned with saving their own skins and looking at moving operations oversea. Some are even accommodating themselves to a Corbyn government. In the Tories proper, continuity remain has a very tenuous grasp through the meagre numbers remain MPs can muster. Finance and their backward bedfellows are now aligned with the hard right European Research Group - the prospect of a low waged, anti-union tax haven off the shore of the world's largest economy appeals to them. Yet even these whose interests so recently mastered the Tories correspond to a rump of about 50 or 60 MPs. The alienation of UK capital-in-general, the dying membership, the shock loss of their majority, and the splintering of the parliamentary party around the petty ambitions of this or that cabinet minister and backbencher, this compounds the dealignment of the Tories from their ruling class roots. Instead, with May we see a weird form of Bonapartism in her party. Rather than contending factions cancelling each other out and the administration in the middle rising to power from a position of strength, May's authority - such as it is - derives from the fact none of the competing factions want her job. Not even Boris Johnson. Well, right now at least. This means each are more or less free floating, buffeted by inner party intrigues and the occasional blast from the Tory party editorial offices in the media. It also condemns the Brexit negotiations to their being driven by the perceived needs of party management.

Boris Johnson, like May, like Dave, is an embodiment of Tory crisis. But, from his point of view, his strategy of saying outrageous things and being racist does have the virtue of realigning the party's class compass. To win he needs to gobble up the ERG vote, who are disproportionately represented in but are by no means a majority of members, re-absorb the UKIP vote that, in his view, May's Chequers compromise gave away. His Brexit is one in which the sectional interests Dave championed are hegemonic. Unfortunately for Johnson, what's left of the membership are not behind him - only 35% according to the recent Conservative Home members' poll. His emerging strategy also has a real snag. Just as Blair reasoned that Labour could move to the right because its traditional voters have nowhere to go, Johnson is assuming that once his feet are under the Downing Street table some point after Brexit is done that his voter coalition will stick together. There is a possibility, albeit an outside one that centre leaning Tories could decamp to form their own party, and with them could go the layer of occasional, liberal-leaning Tory voters who find his faux bonhomie and racism less than congenial. Especially if the LibDems get their act together and start to realise there's greater profits to be had from targeting the Tories. In other words, by adopting a deliberately reactionary politics because it suits his ambitions he's ceding ground all over the place, gifting space to the other parties to try and tie capital into episodic alliances of convenience. And this is assuming Johnson would be able to get on the leadership ballot paper in the first place.

It's difficult to see how the Tories can extricate themselves from this mess, as it's a crisis like no other it has faced in its long history. To survive and thrive as a going concern, it needs to re-establish its relationship with capital as a whole, draw deep from that one nation well and give significant numbers of voters a stake in the wealth of the nation, and become a more inclusive, moderate and socially liberal outfit. This requires much more than a lick of paint and requires demands work and, yes, struggle. The odd purge wouldn't go amiss either. When you look around the Tory benches, can you see anyone who's up to this task?