It is not yet clear when the next general election will be.
It is possible that the Sunak government will manage to stagger on until the last possible moment, with the election towards the end of 2024.
However, it could fall apart in office well before then, resulting in a general election this year.
Splits in the parliamentary Tory party could develop explicitly around issues relating to Sunak’s inability to respond effectively to the strikes.
On the NHS, in particular, they are already developing.
More Tory MPs switching to the Labour benches is entirely possible.
A new market crisis could also trigger a dramatic acceleration of the Tories’ implosion.
However, it can also be other issues, superficially unrelated to the strike wave, which lead to a new high-pitch of rebellion by Tory MPs.
The Tory right keep demanding ever-more brutal measures against refugees, and threaten to hold Sunak’s feet to the fire to ensure he carries out his utopian and pointless pledge to remove most EU-derived laws from the statute book by the end of the year.
If it is even partially implemented this will further exacerbate the problems of businesses, particularly smaller businesses, which trade with the EU.
Meanwhile the slightest hint of moving towards a closer relationship with the EU, which the majority of the capitalist class badly wants, leads to a renewed hysterical outcry from a swathe of the Tory backbenchers.
Despite the improved ‘mood music’ between the British government and the EU, the problems of the Northern Ireland protocol have not been resolved and are likely to flare up again.
In reality, even if the issues which most bitterly divide the parliamentary Tory party appear unrelated to the economic weakness of British capitalism or to the class struggle, this will not actually be the case.
The complete breakdown of Tory party discipline is ultimately as a result of the increasing hatred for the party among wide sections of the working and middle class.
Facing electoral catastrophe at the next election, many of them can no longer see much point in trying to maintain even a façade of unity.
The Tory party was once among the most successful capitalist parties on the planet.
Its hollowing out, over many decades, has reflected the decline of British capitalism and its increasing failure to meet the needs of the majority.
The Tories have been in power for twelve years now but, even at their strongest during that period, their support and social base has been extremely weak.
Initially, in 2010, they were only able to limp back into power as part of a coalition with the Liberal Democrats.
They won a majority in 2015, but with the support of only 24.4% of the total electorate.
This was the lowest share for any majority government since the introduction of universal male suffrage in 1918.
The savage austerity they have implemented has deepened hatred towards them among wide layers of the working class.
Membership of the Tory party fell to 150,000 in 2012 (compared to an estimated 3 million in the 1950s) and hasn’t made it back to 200,000 at any point in the decade since.
It was claimed that Johnson’s right-wing populism won a new generation of workers to the Tories.
In fact, while a limited number of workers did lend the Tories their vote in 2019, Tory party membership only increased to 185,000.
Even allowing for higher than average death rates, given the age of the Tory membership, no more than 50,000 people – 0.1% of the population – can have decided to waste £25 on joining.
Now, after three leaders in the space of six months, after the pandemic and the current cost-of-living crisis, even the limited, shallow, increase in support that Johnson achieved in 2019 has shattered.
There is a widespread feeling that everything in Britain is broken, above all the NHS, and that no one can afford to live; and the Tories are to blame.
It is extremely difficult to imagine what Sunak, or any Tory leader, could now do to significantly dent this mood.
Therefore, while all elections represent just one moment in time, and outcomes are therefore uncertain, by far the most likely result is Labour leader Starmer becoming the next prime minister, possibly at the head of a Labour government with a large majority.
The main motivation for voting Labour will not, however, be enthusiasm for Starmer or his programme, but rather that they appear the only viable means to get the Tories out.
If the Tories do manage to limp on, more or less in one piece, until the general election, they will fragment further once they are out of power.
Already, in December last year, Nigel Farage’s Reform Party (with him having ‘retired’, at least for now) was being highlighted by the capitalist media after reaching 7% in the polls, clearly indicating the space for a right-wing populist party to emerge strengthened from the Tories’ wreckage in the next period.
The most important factor that would weaken such a development is the building of a new mass party of the working class.
A tiny glimpse of the effect such a party could have was shown in the 2022 Erdington by-election when, even in the difficult circumstances of the immediate impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, TUSC was able to come third, pushing the Reform Party into fourth place, compared to 2019 position when, standing as the Brexit Party, they came third with 1,441 votes.
