Part 3 – Different Labels, Same Cans of Beans
Those believing that the exposure of Reform's racism will destroy it are deluding themselves. That information is already priced into its support. In fact, the current media attention may even win it back some of the support it lost to Restore from those who saw Reform as not racist enough! Reform may see its support in polls drop as a consequence of the current media attention, but only as a consequence of its “softer” racist wing responding to a changed political “vibe”. Whether even they actually vote Reform, when it comes to elections, or for Badenoch's rapidly Rightward moving Tories is another question.
What is clear is that despite retaining the name - “The Conservative Party” - it is dead. It is, now, simply simply a version of the old Tory Party. The Conservative Party of the 20th Century, which cohabited within the same organisational structure as that Tory Party, and dominated it, has become impossible. Its ideology, and its membership and voter base is, now, the property of the Liberals, and Blair-Right wing of the Labour Party. Ironically, Blair himself, as he cosies up to the likes of global authoritarians such as Trump, Netanyahu etc., in search of making a quick buck, has himself abandoned that ideological ground. Blair is no longer a Blair-Right.
As I have set out before, the problem for that Conservative social-democracy (neoliberalism) is that it is based on the interests of the ruling-class owners of fictitious capital (interest-bearing capital). For most of the 20th century, and particularly during the heyday of social democracy after WWII, (1945-75), the expansion of real industrial capital (large-scale socialised capital) meant a growing mass of profit, and, out of that profit, a growing mass of those other revenues that are deductions from it, i.e. interest/dividends, rent, profit of enterprise and taxes.
The ruling-class owners of fictitious-capital, and their state, were content to see a continuous rise in their revenues (interest/dividends, and taxes), even if, over time, the share of the total profits going to these revenues declined, as a greater proportion had to be utilised as profit of enterprise/retained profits to fund capital accumulation. The latter itself was a consequence of the usual long-wave cycle process, whereby capital accumulation moves from intensive to extensive accumulation, productivity growth slows, the demand for labour rises faster than its supply, so relative wages rise and relative profits fall. That process – the profits squeeze – culminated in the mid 1970's – a crisis of overproduction of capital relative to labour.
The solution to that crisis, as in previous long-wave cycles, was a technological revolution, which replaces labour with fixed capital/machines/technology. In the 1970's/80's, that base technology was the microchip. But, as I have set out, elsewhere, the consequence of this was that the burgeoning profits and rate of profit of the 1980's and 90's, led to the supply of loanable money-capital rising faster than the demand for it, so interest rates fell, and asset prices rose sharply.
As asset prices soared, the ruling-class owners of those assets (shares, bonds, land), and their state, became transfixed by this apparent creation of wealth out of thin air. That delusion, and equation of capital gains with “profit”, spread into popular consciousness, seen in the growing fascination of homeowners with the constant rise in the market price of their homes, even though such nominal rises in price made them, in real terms, worse off!! Their only real consolation was the schadenfreude that those who were not homeowners were made even worse off by such price rises, though even that should have been tinged by the thought that amongst this latter group would be their children and grandchildren.
By the mid 90's, the entire focus of conservative social democracy (neoliberalism), reflecting this delusion, had shifted away from the accumulation of industrial capital, and, thereby, expansion of profit, as the basis of growing revenues (interest/dividends, rent, taxes, profit of enterprise), as well as growing wages as employment expanded, and on to the growth of these asset prices. The era of speculation/gambling had begun.
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