THE departure of Gavin Williamson as a minister, the first of the Rishi Sunak premiership, tells us something important about this government and its divisions.

We should be clear that the entire Tory Party is united in support of the plan to impose yet more austerity on ordinary people. But the growing resistance to those plans means the Tory monolith can crack — sometimes in the most unexpected places — and we should take advantage of that.

Despite the parliamentary niceties, and Sunak’s clear concern about letting him go, it is clear Williamson was sacked. This is his third sacking as minister; the fact that such a widely disliked and discredited figure was ever recalled to government demonstrates how brittle this Tory Party is.

It is a party riddled with factionalism. To attempt to hold it together Sunak is obliged to appoint people who have already demonstrated they are unfit for office, or who have proven to be a failure, or who hold crank positions — or all of the above.

As well as Williamson himself, Suella Braverman fits into that category, as does the new “minister for women” Maria Caulfield, who opposes a woman’s right to choose.

In fact, Sunak and Jeremy Hunt both themselves fit that bill. One of them promoted the disastrous “eat out to help out” campaign, then launched a Budget this March which was an aggressive addition to austerity, even when the economy was already faltering and inflation beginning to surge. The other sabotaged the NHS for seven years, leaving it wholly incapable of coping with a long-predicted global pandemic.

The media frequently describes the pressure on ministers and the government itself as coming from their own back benches — but this merely underlines the superficiality of most political commentary. Because most Tory MPs, and especially this shower, have no interest in defending the most vulnerable, despite their claims to — they would not have voted for all the cuts to date if that were true.

Instead, daily and remorselessly, their email inboxes fill with complaints about the effect of the cost-of-living crisis and the attacks on living standards that this government and its predecessors have caused. Even Opposition MPs are not immune from this popular discontent. We can only imagine that the government back benchers get it even harder. They deserve to.

This “pressure from the backbenches” is really a tribute to the resistance that has already been mounted by trade union members, campaigners and activists. Because it is not enough for ordinary people to understand that their living standards are falling — it must also be clearly explained that this is the responsibility of the government. Crucially, there must be an alternative.

The turmoil in the Tory Party is therefore a tribute to the militancy and activism against government attacks, including by readers of this newspaper. Clearly, the aim cannot be simply to dump the most odious members of an odious government — the goal is to win the strikes and their demands. The Tory casualties along the way are simply a welcome by-product.

It also seems that employers in some key industries have been forced to the negotiating table. Given the ongoing ties between the privatised rail companies and the government, this means the government has changed its stance on refusing negotiations. At the same time, more public-sector workers have come out on strike, such as the lecturers. Teachers and civil servants might be about to follow, and its is reported that up to one million NHS workers could strike over pay and conditions.

The scale of this resistance is the biggest in a generation and affects us all. I do not always agree with Polly Toynbee, but she was right when she recently argued that the NHS workers fighting for better pay were also fighting for your health and for the future of the NHS.

There must be no avoiding the issue. The NHS is in crisis because of Tory policies. A failure to support striking NHS staff is to ask them to shoulder the burden of Tory failure. No-one in the Labour Party or in the trade union movement should ever take such a stance.

What are the prospects for victory? It should be obvious that this is going to be a prolonged fight. Whatever their fierce internal rows, the Tories are united in this renewed austerity drive. The business organisations like the CBI are so keen on the fight they were in a tiny minority in welcoming the disastrous Liz Truss-Kwasi Kwarteng Budget.

But that unity may not last. The Tory determination to make working people and the poor pay for their crisis can be broken. Williamson may only be a tiny pebble on the political landscape, but it was external pressure on the government that shifted him.

Theirs is a high-risk strategy. It is now reported that Sunak and Hunt will be looking for up to £60 billion in tax increases and spending cuts in their Budget. This is not far from the £70bn Truss-Kwarteng Budget which crashed the financial markets and caused higher inflation and higher interest rate costs for borrowers.

The reason the markets crashed is not because they oppose austerity. It is because they did not believe the scale of the austerity planned was feasible.

The markets thought that not all the measures could be pushed through (those famous Tory backbenchers again) and that they would be left to pick up the borrowing bill. That is why the biggest casualty was the government bond market.

Yet the plans to be unveiled on November 17 are not much lower than the last disastrous Fiscal Statement. They contain their own risk of not being “credible.” This is a political euphemism, meaning they will meet too much resistance from those most badly affected, the working class and the poor — and undoubtedly from wider sections of society too, who have already been hit by this government.

Our task is simple. We need to keep up that pressure, maintain and increase the resistance to these Tory policies, and make the lives and job prospects of Tory MPs a misery — just as they are trying to do to the rest of us. If we do that, who knows what the outcome could be?

Diane Abbott is MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington.