As I've set out before, whoever succeeds Johnson will be worse. All the candidates have had to move sharply Right, in order to secure the votes of the Tory membership, which itself represents that large reactionary, petty-bourgeois mass that got the Tories elected, and that secured a majority of votes (though not of the electorate) in the referendum. Of the two remaining, Truss best fits that description. But, Truss is a gift for the Liberals, though not for Labour.
Liz Truss began her political career – and for these bourgeois politicians it is a career, like being a lawyer, rather than an ideological commitment – as a Liberal Democrat. She was President of the Liberal Democrats at Oxford University, as well as being a staunch proponent of abolishing the Monarchy. Having joined the Tories in the 1990's, she obviously saw her career moving forward faster on a blue rather than a yellow bus. She continued to move Right, although, in 2016, she did support Remain, in the referendum. Since then, she has moved further Right, and is now not only a firm proponent of Brexit, supported by the likes of Rees-Mogg, but a war-monger, who has rattled her sabre, ridiculously, in the direction of the EU over Northern Ireland, as well as over Ukraine, as she attempts to secure the support of the Tory, hard right, reactionary nationalists.
What makes this such a boon for the Liberals is the remarkable similarity of this transition and duplicity of Truss, with that of the journey of Starmer. True, he did not start out as a Liberal student, but rather as a Pabloite, but it didn't take long, after his student days, to move quickly rightwards, into the camp of the Blair-rights. Like Truss, he dutifully supported Remain in 2016, when that looked like the safest bet in town, and continued to push that line when Corbyn began to slip back into his old economic nationalism. Of course, despite his ephemeral time spent in the ranks of Pabloism, Starmer never did argue the case against Brexit in the terms of socialist internationalism, but, like Cameron and Blair, on the grounds of Neoliberalism, and British national self-interest, i.e. the interests of specifically British capital, which makes the transition to Brexit nationalism that much easier. In fact, Starmer's commitment to a second referendum, at that time, mirrors Johnson's advocacy of Brexit, as he attempted to provide himself with a fulcrum of support, for his leadership bid.
Not, only did Starmer switch overnight from being a fervent Remainer to being an ardent Brexiter, when he became Leader, but all of the promises he gave to party members, to get elected, about continuing with the policy direction of the party, established in the Corbyn years, were summarily ditched without trace.
Again, what makes this such manna for the Liberals is precisely that similarity, also, with Johnson, the similarity that they have all been prepared to say anything in order to further their own careers, even if the next minute they say the complete opposite, when they think that is more opportune. If voters really want something different from Johnson's lying and deception, then they certainly can't look to either Truss or Starmer for it. Not, of course, that the Liberals are any different, but as far as the voters are concerned, its been ten years since the Liberals promised to oppose increased Tuition Fees, and then dropped it, in order to get seats in a coalition government. No one has heard of Ed Davey, which, in these conditions, is a bonus, because he's not going to be tainted with all of the lies and deception of the other party Leaders.
The Tories will undoubtedly get a bounce, when they choose their next Leader, but, the reality is that the Tories woes are a continued manifestation that, as a potential ruling bourgeois party, it is conflicted in, on the one hand, trying to represent the interests of its petty-bourgeois members and voters, and, on the other, also representing the interests of the ruling class, and its state. The two class interests are antagonistic and that antagonism has continually erupted since the 1990's.
A large section of the professional middle class will be unable to vote for a Tory Party headed in the direction of nationalistic Brexit reaction, and, as the damage from Brexit continues to snowball, will see no reason to vote for the same policies advocated by a Brexit supporting Blue Labour. The Tory bounce amongst its reactionary core that turned away, given all of the negative media coverage against Bojo, will evaporate the small lead that Blue Labour enjoyed during that period, but those votes that continue to drain away from the Tories, as they head further Right, will now wash even more decisively towards the Liberals, driving forward the momentum they have obtained in all of the recent by-elections, local elections and so on, in which Labour has performed miserably.
At the moment, Labour is seen as the natural alternative to the Tories, simply because that has been the case for most of the last century, and its recent opinion poll lead reaffirms that. However, the by-elections show that, when it comes to actual elections, the overall opinion polls are highly misleading, because, in each of those elections, not only have the Liberals massively outperformed a struggling Blue Labour, but, in several, the Liberals came from third place, behind Labour, to overhaul them, and win the seat from the Tories. As the Tories get a bounce, and Labour's poll lead disappears, that will even more make the Liberals look like the obvious alternative, in many seats across the country, not just in marginal Tory seats, where the Labour vote will collapse and go over wholesale to a Liberal party offering Labour's core progressive vote a real alternative, but also in Labour marginals, where the Liberals will pick up both progressive Labour and middle class Tory votes.
The Liberals will have an endless supply of past quotes from both Truss and Starmer to use to demolish their current reactionary, nationalist positions on Brexit, and at the same time to hammer home the point that, just like Boris Johnson, their whole political career has been marked by a willingness to say anything, to lie through their teeth, whilst actually believing nothing of what they say. The Liberals have at least a year before the next election, in which they will be aided and abetted by the unfolding chaos caused by Brexit to hammer home that message, and to make it the clear flag around which they muster the forces of progress in Britain, whilst the Tories and Blue Labour squabble over who will get the biggest share of the votes of the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie. It will put the Liberals in the mirror image position that the Tories enjoyed when they were able to consolidate the reactionary nationalist vote around them whilst, Labour, Liberals and others divided up the progressive anti-Brexit vote.
The tragedy is that it should have been Labour that was able to have occupied that progressive position within the political battlefield, but once again snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
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