DAVID CAMERON has emerged from his £25,000 faux Romany caravan to conduct the foreign policy of the second most powerful imperialist state in the world.

After the crudities of the Suella Braverman interlude, we are told that Rishi Sunak’s latest appointment gifts him a wise consigliere offering a socially liberal gloss to his Tory government.

Even those metropolitan sophisticates invested in the most permissive of moral regimes might find simulated intimacy with a dead pig at the outer limits of their tolerance and perhaps not the best qualification for one embarking on a Middle Eastern diplomatic mission.

On the domestic front, the government now promises compulsory cuts in benefits and proposes to end free prescriptions to people who refuse a Department of Work and Pensions offer of employment.

As the architect of austerity — a role he shared with Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg — Cameron has form in imposing cuts on public expenditure.

If the principal conceit of the liberal is to patronise the poor while ensuring their charitable giving remains conditional on their passivity, the distinctive trait of the neoliberal is to substitute charitable giving and volunteering for the collective responsibilities of government.

Cameron’s contribution to this idea dripped with the characteristic condescension of our ruling class. As premier, in his July 19 2010 speech he said: “You can call it liberalism. You can call it empowerment. You can call it freedom. You can call it responsibility. I call it the Big Society.

“The Big Society is about a huge culture change … Where people, in their everyday lives, in their homes, in their neighbourhoods, in their workplace don’t always turn to officials, local authorities or central government for answers to the problems they face, but instead feel both free and powerful enough to help themselves and their own communities.

“It’s about people setting up great new schools. Businesses helping people getting trained for work. Charities working to rehabilitate offenders.

“It’s about liberation — the biggest, most dramatic redistribution of power from elites in Whitehall to the man and woman on the street.”

In truth, it is the man and woman on the streets that these people fear most.

The last two years have provided a masterclass in the power of the street. The cumulative effect of every strike picket is seen in the changing consciousness of millions who now have exhausted their toleration for this fag-end of a government.

Whether the masses have any confidence that real change will be delivered by an incoming Keir Starmer government is a question that only time will provide an answer to.

In the meantime, we can see in the real movement of the masses a sense that on foreign policy the Labour leadership is out of step with both party and public opinion.

Pollsters YouGov, even using a series of questions that seem purpose-designed to obscure the real contours of public opinion, nevertheless found that a majority favours a ceasefire in Palestine.

A clear 33 per cent want a straightforward ceasefire, 24 per cent favour a temporary ceasefire to allow humanitarian aid and while just a quarter don’t have a clear view. Support for Israel’s actions is at 9 per cent. Where Westminster Labour and the Tories agree, the British people dissent.

Almost nine in 10 (89 per cent) of Labour voters want a ceasefire. Near three-quarters of Tory voters want a ceasefire. Over three-quarters of people in Britain as a whole want a ceasefire. But our ruling class and the political caste which serves them continue to sanction Israel’s war against the Palestinian people.

Why does our political class resist the will of the people? Or, to put it another way, how do we understand the neoliberal mindset?

We can discover its most pervasive expression in the phrase “rules-based world order” which encapsulates the notion that the “international community” — constituted by North America, western Europe and a pole of influence along an axis of Australasia and Japan — stands for universal human values.

In fact, where global opinion is divided — over Nato’s strategy in the Ukraine war and Israel’s war on the Palestinians — an actual majority, including the global South, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and much of Asia and Russia’s sphere of influence take a different view on most questions of war and peace.

As we can see from our own experience, domestic opinion in each of the main capitalist nations includes very powerful support for a ceasefire in Israel’s war on the Palestinians.

A ceasefire, is, of course, the essential first step but the bigger issue is what is necessary to ensure Palestinian national rights which is the only guarantee of an enduring peace.

In a thoughtful piece in this newspaper, Joe Gill seemed to suggest that a two-state solution entails reconstituting Palestine on the basis of the much-diminished territory presently left to Palestinians.

This, would of course accord with what he describes as “the reality is that the imperialist powers want a two-state solution in which the Palestinians accept a position as a subordinated territory that lacks geographical, military or political independence.”

But the battle is for the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state — not on the fragmented spaces presently constituted — but on the 1967 borders as specified in UN resolutions 242 and 338 with East Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinian state.

This indeed is a big ask but it is a more realisable project than either a caliphate on the entire territory of historic Palestine and the wider Muslim world (which is one of the contradictory positions Hamas advances) or an armed uprising against the militarised Israeli state.

Israel’s strategy is to create a sea of misery for Palestinians and instrumentalise its relationship with Qatar and Hamas to fragment Palestinian opinion and create a climate of despair.

The symbiotic relationship between Israel’s strategy, inflected with Benjamin Netanayu’s apocalyptic tactics, and Hamas’s theocratic ideology feeds the pessimism which is designed to disable the Palestine national movement

It suited Israel to have Hamas in command of Gaza but Hamas is not without opposition. Indeed Marwan Barghouti, presently banged up in an Israeli jail, is more popular and would likely win a presidential election, which is why Israel works to prevent the consolidation of Palestinian forces, in Gaza the West Bank and Israel itself or accept him as a negotiating partner.

By 1982 the Camp David Accords compelled Israel (under Menachem Begin) to evacuate its bases and settlements in the Sinai. In 2005 (under Ariel Sharon) it abandoned 20 settlements and its bases in Gaza.

Establishing a Palestinian state necessarily entails continuing this process, with the alien settlers presently occupying stolen land in the West Bank being removed in a process sanctioned by international law and UN resolution.

Gill makes the point that the Oslo Accords, signed 30 years ago, were betrayed almost immediately by Israel and the US. But the balance of forces is changing and will continue.

He argues that “removing 700,000 Israeli and foreign Jewish settlers from the West Bank and East Jerusalem” is “a clear case of idealist, or backward-looking reformist thinking.”

It is hard to see how enforcing an agreement to relocate Israeli settlers in the territory they can legitimately occupy — thus negating the post-1967 zionist project and confounding Western imperialism — can be designated “reformist.”

But if, as he correctly argues, “Israel, as a Jewish supremacist settler colony, cannot be reconstituted as a good neighbour to a truncated, fractured and effectively unviable Palestinian state,” how much more difficult would it be for Palestinian national rights to be asserted in a unitary (capitalist) state in which the institutional power of the pre-existing zionist state retains a powerful material presence?

The principal weakness of the so-called one-state solution is that it lacks a credible strategy for traversing the distance from where we are today to its goal.

It is difficult to see circumstances in which Israel, and its sponsors, can accept a situation in which Jewish people can potentially become a minority. Most world opinion, including most Jewish people, might find a zionist state ethnically cleansed of its indigenous people difficult to accept.

Jewish people living in the territory might find a secure existence in an internationally recognised Israel alongside a sovereign Palestine a better prospect than a continual war of attrition and reciprocal revenge. The analogy with South Africa falls because black Africans constitute an absolute and unassailable majority.

Contrary to Gill’s assertion, it is the idealist notion of a single unitary secular state — born of despair and magical thinking — that is essentially reformist. That it flies in the face of any Marxist conception of the state is not only of theoretical concern to Marxist-Leninists.

For Palestinians of every persuasion, who must assert their national rights on sovereign territory, it is a practical question that turns on the changing geo-political geometry of the Middle East, the changing balance of forces in the world and the growing understanding that without satisfying the demand of Palestinians for a state of their own making there can be no peace.

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.wordpress.com.