RECENT weeks have seen the great traditions of the British state on full display. 

A government boosting bankers’ bonuses while cutting workers’ wages and planning anti-union laws. Flogging arms to conflict zones from Ukraine to Yemen to keep wars on the boil. And the Metropolitan Police shooting a black man dead.

We know bread is getting unaffordable, but the circuses aren’t so enchanting either.

Front of stage, it has all been trumpets, flags, heralds proclaiming, guardsmen marching and commoners so inclined inching forward in the Great British Queue.

Behind the scenes, the same ruling elite that has been displaying its peacock feathers in one of its ritual medieval moments is preparing an all-out class offensive.

That is the significance of Liz Truss and her programme of return to unbridled Thatcherism. Levelling up is out, handing out to bankers and energy companies is in.

Boris Johnson once remarked that “my real boss is the Daily Telegraph.” Had that actually been so he would have been fired some time ago — and not for the licentiousness, mendacity and corruption that actually brought down the curtain on his regime.

No, for the Telegraph and its ghoulish parade of columnists, from the uber-Hayekian Allister Heath through to the princess of the poison pen Allison Pearson, Johnson’s sin was not being a real conservative.

Nor, for that matter, was his predecessor, Theresa May, with her chat about putting working people first. Both sought a post-Thatcher future for the Tory Party, based around Brexit plus modest state intervention.

They never did much about it, of course. May lost her parliamentary majority in the Corbyn surge of 2017, and Johnson’s attention span never stretched as far as making the changes he waffled about. Both faced resistance from the market liberal fanatics in the Conservative ranks.

Now the neoliberal crew have their woman in No 10. She is not secure. Most Tory MPs would have preferred someone else, and most will worry that her aggressive policies will cost them the next election.

Certainly, she is offering nothing to the fabled “red wall” of ex-Labour seats lost to the Tories, mainly over Brexit, in 2019. Tax cuts for business and hampers for bankers when family finances are in crisis is certainly not a winning formula.

Truss’s big idea, it seems, is “growth.” That requires higher investment which, for this government, can only come from the private sector. New Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng is prioritising helping the City of London, including by scrapping the cap on bankers’ bonuses.

When ministers are trying to impose pay cuts on hard-pressed public service and transport workers it has the smell of electoral suicide.

The traditional genius of the Conservative Party is that it has often succeeded in masking a class policy as a “national” one, passing off strategies which are good for the capitalist elite as somehow good for everyone.

Truss is testing that time-honoured strategy to destruction. She is putting all her eggs in the basket of a class-war policy aimed at enriching business while cracking down on working people and hoping that a boom will bail her out.

It has been shown that she can be made to back down. A crackpot plan to regionalise public-sector pay rates was swiftly abandoned.

Likewise her pledge of “no handouts” to meet the energy crisis has had to be modified. Fuel bills will be frozen and there will indeed be handouts to make that happen — albeit to the energy companies whose profits the new premier regards as sacrosanct.

Now the new government risks being squeezed from two directions.

The first is of course the newly aroused working-class movement, expressed in a growing strike wave and expanding forms of community-based resistance to the attack on living standards.

The second is international market opinion. Bailing out the energy firms will cost a fortune — likely more than 1 per cent of GDP — while cutting taxes will lead to increased borrowing. If new investment does not start delivering growth fast then the bond market may lose patience.

As the FT’s Martin Wolf observed this week, these folk need to be assured that Britain is led “by sober and responsible people.” 

That is not the case right now and Truss will soon discover that there are some things which cannot be concealed behind bearskins, bishops and blasts on the trumpet.

Socialism in perspective

LAST week Russia and Ukraine were at war and there were military clashes between Armenia and Azerbaijan and between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan — all former Soviet republics.

Yet still there are some who see the fall of the Soviet Union as a good thing. Clearly, Soviet power did not resolve the national question as comprehensively as it claimed and today’s crises can’t be resolved by nostalgia.

Nevertheless, it is just as clear that the overthrow of socialism has been nothing but a disaster for the peoples of countries that lived peacefully together for generations.

Socialists in the 21st century cannot aspire to reproduce the defeated socialism of the 20th. But neither will we profit by pretending that the latter was an unmitigated failure. Capitalist restoration, bringing impoverishment, ethnic strife and wars, in fact serves to highlight the progress socialism represented.

Peace is the word

PUTIN’S war in Ukraine is going poorly, militarily and diplomatically. His army has lost considerable territory around Kharkiv and there have been signs of India and even China adopting a more critical tone.

The vociferous war party argues this means that the Western policy of continuing the conflict is working.

It isn’t. US hostility to China as well as Russia means that Beijing will likely stick with Moscow under any foreseeable circumstances. No-one new is signing up to Nato’s sanctions.

Nor do Ukraine’s advances point to a rapid military conclusion. Dislodging Russia altogether from the territory it holds remains a remote prospect. The larger risk is of escalation, even of nuclear weapons being used — not to mention the economic dislocation that will endure as long as the war does.

So this is not a Fawlty Towers “Don’t mention the war” moment. War connects intimately with the crisis at home.

In particular, the bipartisan calls for increased militarism means, according to the Royal United Services Institute, 5 per cent on income tax of equivalent cuts in state spending if the new money for arms is to be found.

There will be no social justice without peace. Acquiescing in the Anglo-US war policy leads to destitution and deprivation here.