The "Surrender" of Jacob Rees-Mogg

And so government is planning for a Threads Brexit after all, the sort that will see imports held up, medicines vanish from hospital pharmacies and 3,500 troops on the street to "assist" the authorities. As Theresa May is accused of deliberately running the clock down to get her Brexit deal through, Amber Rudd is doing her heir apparent best to assure the world that no deal's not going to happen, while the likes of disgraced serving minister Liam Fox, Jeremy Hunt and Penny Mordaunt are saying it's no biggie. No, it isn't if you've got a cash pile of unearned wealth to fall back on. Meanwhile amid the chaos, the latest twists and turns of one Jacob Rees-Mogg almost escaped wide notice.

Blink and you'd have missed it because it led the headlines for all of five minutes. Mogg got up in the Commons yesterday to announce how he now had confidence in the Prime Minister because the Conservative Party had demonstrated its confidence. See the toadying for yourself. It's all a far cry from the gnashing of teeth and brandishing of resignation letters of just a fortnight ago. What are we looking at, then. Is it a capitulation of the Mogg-led European Research Group and the dank fantasies of hard Brexit to real politik, or is something altogether craftier afoot? Let's consider the options.

In what you might call the 'long June' since May lost her majority 18 months ago, she allowed herself to be publicly pushed around by the Moggites. The election said no to her hard Brexit approach, but the backbenchers were determined not to let the historic opportunity to slip. The ERG called the tune and May danced her merry jig long before the shapes she threw at this year's conference. And then, finally at Chequers she unveiled an approach to the negotiations with the EU that were not to her tormentors' liking. However, on this occasion she didn't cave, even when Boris Johnson and David Davis decamped to the backbenches to spend more time with their leadership ambitions. Whether she belatedly realised the ERG couldn't touch her, thanks to the inverted Bonapartism atop the Tory party, or was only stringing them along for the sake of an easier life is immaterial. The leopard print heel was now on the other foot and a humiliating kicking was duly administered. The confidence vote they spent a couple of months agitating for finally came to pass, and it must have been a cathartic 24 hours for the very dregs of the Tory party. 117 MPs in the end gave May's leadership the thumbs down, and the ERG were done. They can if they wish vote down the deal but they were shown not to be strong enough to be the threat to May they thought they were. Is Mogg's capitulation simply a recognition of their hopeless position and that their rebellion now is little more than for rebellion's sake?

Don't be daft. Remember what the Tory party's chief job is. It doesn't exist to be the "best managers" of British capitalism measured in terms of GDP growth, employment figures, trade deficits and the rest. Those are secondary considerations. It is above all a party of class war, of bourgeois power. Its mission is the preservation of the balance of power between capital and labour, up to and including using the power of the state to enforce it. Traditionally the different factions of the Tory party have mapped onto fractions of business interests, though in recent years the situation has grown complex as the ruling class itself effectively fractured, the relationship between party and class has grown strained, and some party factions have more or less grown estranged from their base. One faction who hasn't is, guess who? Our friends the ERG.

Mogg with his hedge fund interests typify the cluster of capital aligned with the ERG. Socially useless, speculative, short-termist, even from the perspective of British capitalism they are the wing who should be kept as far away from the committee for the management of the common affairs of the bourgeoisie as possible. Their immediate class interests are always in tension with the interests of the class as a whole. The pathetic vision of Brexit they've tried peddling to the public, which basically amounts to a heavily deregulated offshore tax haven entirely coincidentally is a picture of the kind of arrangement ERG-aligned capital would find most congenial. Even the disaster of a no deal Brexit maps nicely into this universe. The shock of an abrupt ejection from the EU would chuck millions of jobs onto the fire, the pound would plummet, imports and exports severely disrupted and the UK takes a permanent hit to an economy already at sub-par levels of performance. Disaster. Or opportunity, depending on where you're standing. Heavily exposed British businesses become ripe for take over, and the Tory government - assuming there's no election - are "forced" to rip up labour protections, regulations, and sell off remaining state-owned assets to restore "confidence". And all this before a weakened Britain signs up to a Trump trade deal with the United States. Eventually matters are bound to stabilise and growth will return, but the political economy of the UK is utterly changed - and it's the speculators and disaster capitalists of Mogg and the ERG faction who stand to make a killing.

Why May? Despite trying to no confidence her, the ERG's best bet is to go along with her for the next month, vote down her deal but stand against the inevitable no confidence votes. Whether it's the doomed attempt the SNP and Liberal Democrats are foolishly agitating for, Labour's own narrow no confidence motion targetting the Prime Minister, or the one certain to pop along after losing her withdrawal agreement vote. If May stays in office, and assuming she doesn't resign, that is the path to no deal. Few if any of the ERG are unhinged enough to go against their sectional class interests and usher in a Jeremy Corbyn-led government in normal times, never mind when their demented prize is close to hand.

The political collapse of Jacob Rees-Mogg is a ruse. It's anything but a surrender. Changing circumstances demand changing tactics, but the end game is the same: a disastrous Brexit for which we are going to pay the price while they and their friends help themselves to the loot.