THE Tory leadership candidates have said little of substance in what passes for debate but one constant being repeated is disillusion with the British political system. The likes of Penny Mordaunt and Tom Tugendhat have described it as “broken” and while they have not come up with any specifics to fix it, this is a revealing admission.

This leaves unanswered not just how it can be changed, but how it was broken and by whom? And whose interests are served by a broken political system? The answer – of course – is the modern Tory Party.

Change is underway in how Tories portray present day Britain. All the leadership candidates partly acknowledge that Britain is not in a good place, that people are hurting and that government is failing them. This is a significant shift in the political mood music of the UK. They might not have any concrete ideas for the multiple crises, many of them of their making, but some Tories seem to have accepted that Tory governments have let people down.

This is a huge shift in the political zeitgeist. Tories are doing a very un-Tory thing, much more common in Labour debates in that they are judging the record of their own government. This has major consequences.

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UK politics has been defined by the Tory mantra over the past 40 years – Thatcherism, New Labour, Cameron-Osborne austerity, and of course, Brexit. Rishi Sunak might rail against “something for nothing economics” and try to label it “socialist” but it is an apt description of Tory economics in recent decades and the fantasy of low taxes, a minimal state and world-class public services.

This Tory shift has enormous implications. It is an admission of failure not just about Boris Johnson, but about the past twelve years and, even more, the political and ideological direction of the UK since 1979. This has been a long time coming – through the 2008 banking crash, Brexit, Covid-19 and war in Ukraine – and the inability of Thatcherite economic norms to come to terms with a low growth economy where wages and prosperity have stagnated for over a decade.

Not only are UK politics broken, so too is the UK economic and social model. The social contract which connects government to citizens has been trashed, torn up and humiliated by successive governments – Tory and Labour. Essential supports and assistance that people need from government – whether in welfare, health, education or civic life – have increasingly not been there.

They have either been curtailed, made drastically conditional or contracted out to unaccountable corporates who have no interest in anything but their profits: “Serco Britain” as Neal Ascherson aptly called it.

That broken economic and social Britain has been made possible by the bastardised, hollowed out nature of the UK political system and state. This has seen a Tory Party elected on 40% plus of the votes – which still only amounted to 29.3% of the electorate in Boris Johnson’s “colossal mandate” of 2019 – able to have monopoly political power, govern with few checks and balances, override and tear up the established conventions and rules, and govern in naked self-interest.

The Boris Johnson government has been the most openly corrupt, self-serving, self-rewarding in modern times. It has engaged in industrial scale looting of the public purse and appropriation of public monies to corporate insiders and pals; spending £37 billion on Test and Trace was called a waste of “eye-watering amounts of money” and “failed to deliver its objectives” by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee.

Yet this is not a story just about Johnson and his cavalier conservatism. Instead it goes to the heart of the degeneration of Toryism, the nature of UK politics and the capture of the British state – alongside the entrenchment of elite power. Of the 55 UK prime ministers so far, over one-third were educated at Eton College (20) which is three and a half times the entire number of Labour PMs (6). So much for Tory “meritocracy” or their new championing of “diversity” which does not extend to class.

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The shifting Tory mantra sees leading candidates simultaneously trying to maintain their traditional triumphalism that the UK is “the greatest country in the world” while recognising that something is deeply rotten, that they are responsible for but have no real policies to address it.

This political environment is one where the prospect of a Keir Starmer Labour Government in 2023-24 gets more likely by the day. To do so Labour need to surmount an electoral mountain and overcome a 80 seat Tory majority. This means gaining 130 seats to have a working majority – the scale of which the party has only done once since 1945 – in 1997.

These political numbers mean that a future Labour government may well be a minority administration which has to seek allies and votes from the SNP and Lib Dems. Starmer is currently projecting a “no deals” stance with regard to the SNP, a position born of Labour’s experience in 2015 when Ed Miliband was monstered by David Cameron and the spectre of the SNP having major influence over a minority Labour administration.

Labour come to this, as everyone knows, from a position of weakness and vulnerability, but given the Tory crisis there is an opportunity to be more radical. Minority Labour governments, of which there have been three – 1924, 1929, February 1974 – don’t tend to last long and only one led to a majority administration – October 1974 – which it quickly lost via by-elections.

Labour has to have the maturity to stop pretending it can act like a majority government when it is returned as a minority. Even more it has to recognise that the obsessions of First Past the Post (FPTP winner takes all and parliamentary sovereignty have only aided Tory dominance of UK politics, and hindered Labour.

One small factor in this will be Gordon Brown’s Constitutional Commission which intends to come up with a plan for democratising, decentralising and modernising how the UK is governed. If it came up with all-encompassing comprehensive reform, it could have played a constructive role in the emergence of a more radical Labour approach.

Unsurprisingly, the Brown plan as it currently stands offers none of this and instead is an uneasy half-way house – continuing the old system of absolutism with a bit of reform. Brown has, as we speak, ruled out proportional representation for the Commons, full-scale federalism and a codified, written constitution.

After all these years Labour still clings to the wreckage of the unreformed British state, FPTP and getting an occasional Labour Government after years of Tory rule.

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The end of the era of Tory dominance will not be straightforward, but messy and filled with challenges. But the Tories have conceded that their record in government, and by implication their take on the world, has failed and is part of the problem.

This is a time for political boldness, audacity and clarity. Labour and others must dare to imagine overthrowing the last remnants of Britain’s Empire State with its open contempt for the people of the UK, its ancient rituals and rules used for the new corporate class, and to lay out a set of relationships across these isles fit for the 21st century.

Now that would be a mature conversation relevant for the people of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and would terrify the Tories and the British establishment, calling time on their dominance of UK politics propped up by the undemocratic, unreformed political system.