The Death Throes of Tory Misrule: A Titanic Catastrophe

The Death Throes of Tory Misrule: A Titanic Catastrophe

Observe the pitiful spectacle of the Tory Titanic thrashing in its final death agonies – a behemoth of greed, arrogance and delusion sinking rapidly beneath the waves of its own making. Like that most infamous of doomed maritime arrogance, the RMS Titanic, this ship of feckless buccaneers is being dragged inexorably to the briny depths.

They sank the economy through callous austerity dogma and reckless ideological vandalism. They sank any hopes of an equitable Brexit through endless chicanery and capitulation to big money interests. They sank their own mythical “levelling up” agenda, a fraud from malicious conception, as the richer furrows grew yet more enriched.

And now, the ever-oblivious Rishi Sunak skippers this sinking hulk as it lists deeper into ignominy, he’s like the captain who insists the ship is fine as the band plays on. It’s enough to make you wonder – the fact is, if he’s not captaining the Titanic, then he’s sat on the iceberg unaware it’s heading straight for him.

From Pirates to Rats: The Desertion of a Decaying Tory Administration

Endemic scandal and institutionalised corruption have been the hallmarks of this wretched administration from its tainted inception. And so the teeming rats begin their inevitable desertion as this carcass of Tory misrule slides beneath the surface. The departures of the MPs Halfon and Heappey are but the precursors of a mass abandonment to come by those belatedly sensing the imminence of their party’s utter ruination.

Let’s be clear here – this is nothing less than the death spasms of a movement unforgivably decayed from its original mission of paternalistic stewardship into something more akin to a dissolute pirate crew. Looting, pillaging, rapacious self-interest – this has been the sordid reality behind all the grandiloquent rhetoric about “levelling up” and “taking back control.” A con as vast as it was shameless.

And now, inevitably, the guilty crew scatters as the hulk founders. The doomed vessel’s ministers like Halfon can only proffer self-justifying bromides in deluded wafers of fantasist escapism in the mould of Tolkien’s wizards as he quoted the wizard Gandalf from Lord of the Rings in his resignation letter to the prime minister, and having been a Tory candidate for almost 25 years, Mr Halfon said:

“My time is over: it is no longer my task to set things to rights, nor to help folk to do so.

Personally I can think of a more apt maritime metaphors for this tragedy – of a rotten hull full leaks, and holes…

“You can bail water 24/7, and no matter how good you are at not sinking, you still have a hole in your boat.” ― Kelli Jae Baeli, Crossing Paths

For that is truly the nub of the Tory defenestration we are witnessing – a refusal, a sickening inability to acknowledge and remedy the fundamental flaws of free market capitalist extremism that rotted the governing party from within over decades. Mere bailing is futile if you cannot admit to the hull breaches, the design defects that rendered the craft unviable from the start.

Halfon becomes the 63rd Tory MP to say they will not stand in the next election, with Theresa May and the former cabinet minister Brandon Lewis confirming their departures in recent weeks. Four former Conservatives who now sit as independents are also leaving, meaning that just over a fifth of the Tory MPs elected in 2019 are quitting.

So let the rats desert their sinking wreck with all the undignified haste of self-preservation. Let this dead parliament limp to its overdue constitutional termination, for it ceased being a credible forum for progressive change long ago. A new ship must be launched from fresh timbers – one not compromised from the keel up by the brittle, decaying ideology of robber baron capitalism and self-serving grift.

Starmer’s Neoliberal Autocracy: Thatcherism under a Red Flag

Starmer’s new authoritarian-style neoliberalism—his will be a rule of lawyers, a Thatcherite flag flying from his mast.

But let us not delude ourselves that the sinking of this rotten Tory hulk will see us cleanly sailing into the warm, restorative sunlight of a truly progressive, pro-worker Labour government. Alas, that ship has long since sailed the harbour under Sir Keir Starmer’s captaincy.

No, what awaits is something more akin to a new autocracy of technocratic neoliberalism – Starmer’s hard-headed “rule of lawyers” bearing the unmistakable stench of Thatcherism. For all his ponderous moralistic bluster about economic “responsibility,” the simple fact remains that Labour has been comprehensively captured by the same corrosive ideologies and vested interests that inflicted such structural damage upon the Conservatives.

Under Starmer’s tin-eared stewardship, the red flag has been all but supplanted by the withered union jack of faux patriotism flapping tinnily from his mast. The noble principles of democratic socialism exist now as mere evanescent vapours compared to the brute, anchoring realities of privatisation, deregulation and cosy entwinement with the dictates of capital.

Much like the sinking pirate vessel it seeks to replace, Starmer’s ascendant regime offers nothing more than a different flavour of the same stale ideological gruel that has so disastrously immiserated Britain’s working multitudes. Mere changing of the guard without substantive change to the core mechanics of our decayed, unjust system.

So let us dispense with any naivetés about some luminous new dawn of progressive reform. The truth is we will need to exert maximum pressure from below upon whatever new captain takes possession of these rusting, barnacle-encrusted parliamentary quarterdecks. Without sustained public mobilization and an intransigent, radical grassroots agenda, we’ll merely be exchanging one set of neoliberal buccaneers for another.