THE warm favourite to win the Tory leadership contest is Liz Truss. But there is no good outcome for the majority of people in this country, despite sections of the liberal press trying to drum up support for Rishi Sunak, the author of vicious austerity measures as recently as March this year.

The entire Tory parliamentary party has a common aim of making working people and the poor pay for a crisis they did not cause.

The practical outcome of this entirely undemocratic selection process will be to instal yet another Tory administration, the fourth in six years, which will operate solely in the interests of the 1 per cent of the population.

But as the Bank of England’s own forecasts of soaring inflation, recession and rising unemployment show, the economic backdrop is far worse than anything we have seen in recent history. Because it comes after two recessions, in 2008 and in 2020, the effects will be really grim for most households.

But there are three important factors which mean that this Tory project, while extremely damaging, is likely to fail.

The first of these is that the policies proposed, tax cuts for big business and the rich, more cuts to public services and real wages, have been tried repeatedly from 2010 onwards.

At each turn the Tories have failed to deliver any sustained economic growth and instead the country is stumbling from one crisis to the next.

Cutting business taxes does not lead to increased business investment. Revoking trade deals leads to lower exports. Deregulation does not boost the economy, but leads to disasters. And privatisation and outsourcing do not lead to efficiency, but to subsidies, extortionate charges, huge shareholder pay-outs and raw sewage in our waterways.

Second, there is a now a concerted and growing resistance from organised labour to the dreadful assault on real wages and household incomes.

Readers of this newspaper probably need no telling of quite how many workers have already taken action against derisory pay offers.

At local level there have already been some small but important victories in these fights.

These strikes will widen, as potentially lecturers, nurses, teachers, firefighters, refuse workers and many other others are drawn into dispute. We await the prospect of an outright victory for a union at a national level, which could have an electrifying effect.

There is too an unusual degree of public support for the strikes, even where they do cause serious inconvenience to the public. No doubt this is because most people find themselves in the same boat and clearly sympathise with the strikers.

A recent poll showed a remarkable 64 per cent of the public would support potential strike action, even before it is agreed and before any campaign in support.

The third difficulty for the new prime minister comes from the international situation. While “there is no money left” for free school meals, or increasing universal credit, or for public-sector pay, there is money for war.

Both Liz Truss and the current defence secretary have called for a sharp increase in military spending. The authoritative Royal United Services Institute says that these plans would cost an additional £157 billion over the next eight years. This is equivalent to about £5,600 for every household in Britain and is completely unjustified.

The differences between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss do not at all appear ideological or principled. Rather, they are about the tactics, timing and scope of the further attacks on pay and living standards, the abandonment of any serious efforts on climate change, deregulation.

They are for privatisation, union-busting and draconian legislation in case anyone tries to resist.

This shared aim was always the real content of their Brexit project, unstated in public naturally. But a quick flick through the many pamphlets the contenders and their colleagues over the past few years, as well as the output from the think tanks and advisers they rely on, can leave little room for doubt.

Their ultimate aim is to leave this country far less like a European social/Christian democrat country with a post-WWII welfare state model, and much more like the laissez-faire, rapacious capitalist model of the US.

The heated dispute within the Tory Party is how far and how quickly to move in this direction. But the destination will be disastrous for a majority of people in this country. This is in addition to the terrifying collapse in living standards already under way.

Many other international issues remain. The government has already rejected a sensible deal with France to process asylum application for this country in centres in France, which would allow all legitimate applications and deal a blow to the people-traffickers.

Ministers here have repeatedly rejected it, with the strong suspicion that it would also stifle their permanent, racist campaign against non-white asylum-seekers.

Perhaps the most serious international issue of all is the Tory determination to rip up the Northern Ireland Protocol.

The reputation for duplicity and incompetence this entails does not go unremarked in the rest of the world. Tearing up the Protocol is in breach of at least the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) by imposing a new constitutional arrangement in Ireland after it voted to Remain.

Ministers also know, because they have repeatedly met Loyalists, that their plan is already provoking a resumption of violence on the streets.

Yet the further plan to rip up the existing Human Rights Act and replace it with new legislation will undermine the GFA altogether. It was passed in 1998 alongside the GFA in order to provide some objective legal underpinning to the GFA and to ensure that British governments were not the Agreement’s sole arbiters.
 
For obvious reasons, Irish people have good reason to mistrust the idea that any British government should be the arbiter of its own actions in Ireland.

There is no crystal ball in politics. But what is planned by the incoming Tory government is in conflict with economic reality and with any prospect of good relations with most of the rest of world, including our nearest neighbours Ireland and France. It is also clashes with the growing resistance of organised workers. This is a very powerful combination.

Diane Abbott is a Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington since 1987. She served as shadow home secretary in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet from 2016 to 2020.