THE Tories anticipate a defeat deeper than any suffered for decades. 

This party regards itself as the natural party of government but as squabbling tribes of Tories — each less representative of either public opinion or even the settled positions of the ruling class itself — scrabble for purchase on the public psyche, the scum naturally floats to the top.

Into this category we can consign Suella Braverman’s suggestion that multiculturalism has failed. How the son of an Indian pharmacist gets to be prime minister suggests some routes to integration into one or other of Britain’s contending classes are open to the lucky, the endowed or the enabled.

The Tories have taught us that it is not the colour of people’s skin that is significant but their position in class society.

The profit-driven inflation that is eroding our wages, pensions and benefits strikes at the family budgets of every working-class family irrespective of skin colour but is barely noticed by the rich who, irrespective of their skin colour, make their living from the profits our work creates, the rents and we pay and the interest on the loans we are obliged to take on. 

Millions of workers of every colour are compelled by the logic of the labour market to understand that our collective interests are in conflict with those of the the class personified by the richest man in Parliament.

The Tories want to fight an election not on the economic competence which lazy thinkers attribute to the party of big business and the banks but on wedge issues in a culture war.

The Home Secretary’s grandstanding before an audience of crazed US neocons is a fitting setting for migration policies which, if implemented, would put Britain in breach of its international treaty obligations and likely hobble key sections of the economy. 

Hence the endless attention on the arrival of refugees by boat. The Health Secretary ascribes lengthening NHS waiting lists to managers “wasting time and money on woke virtue signalling.” Eccentric Tory-minded education gurus think every problem in schools can be solved by zero tolerance.

In the Tory mindset every criminal manifestation of our economic crisis is to be managed by locking up the distressed, desperate and drugged.

The Tories have even attempted to weaponise opposition to their own policy on vehicle emissions.

But on climate change the Tories have simply got it wrong. For every Tory MP opposed to HS2 there is a whole body of the conservative-minded (and Conservative voters) who back the net-zero targets which the government announced just a few months ago.

Where the crossover between the climate-concerned and railway-friendly occurs we find people in every part of the country committed to an expansion of public transport.

A massive upgrade of the railway network in northern England is not an alternative to making HS2 work as a fast link beyond Manchester to Leeds but its essential corollary. 

People in the south of the country who face punitive fare increases for failing and undercapitalised services have a natural sympathy for folk further north whose rail services are truncated, underinvested and irregular.

There is a decisive majority for a return to public ownership of public transport coupled with the kind of fares fair deals that are increasingly popular on the continent and, remember, which were first popularised by Ken Livingstone as London mayor.

Germany incentivises rail travel by cut price monthly passes; Italy, France and Spain with low fares; Luxembourg by free travel.

A rebalanced economy that coupled the regeneration of regional manufacturing economies with publicly owned rail and investment in housing, education and the NHS demands a government committed to a Green New Deal.