POLITICAL parties are fragile creations. The centrifugal pressures of personality clashes and policy divisions can, in tranquil times, be contained.

Britain’s first-past-the-post (FPTP) election system has evolved to insulate the Westminster political machines from a direct reflection of the class forces at play in the nation as a whole, but, as Madonna has it in George Harrison’s song, “We are living in a material world.”

Thus in any living organism or social construct, when internal cohesion breaks down, as it has done in the Tory Party at present, the scum floats to the surface.

Tory donor Frank Hester is so rich that he can both shell out a cool £10 million to his party and give voice to a racism so crude that it has exposed the moral cowardice of all who could not bring themselves to condemn it.

Rishi Sunak’s silence is eloquent testimony to the failure of his political leadership. It demonstrates the impossibility of maintaining the unity of his parliamentary party without wholesale concession to the racist right and the impossibility of achieving this minimal goal as he does so.

His Commons majority has become a pressure cooker in which the fear of the coming electoral meltdown has dissolved the political instincts that have kept the Tory Party in government for the larger part of its existence.

The material foundation of this particular episode lies in the failure of the Westminster parliamentary system to adequately reflect the real class forces at play in British society or, for that matter, deal with the national question, challenge sexual discrimination and inequality, manage the human consequences of centuries of colonial exploitation or tranquillise the warmongers.

The internal contradictions that are currently reducing the Tory Party to impotence have a basis in the countervailing tendencies present in Britain’s capitalist formation and reflected in the ruling-class divisions that the referendum campaign exposed.

The next election, whether in springtime or autumn, will likely see this hegemonic party of capital much reduced, perhaps to a rump. A challenge from Reform UK cuts off the Tories from a reservoir of votes on the right, while Labour’s poll lead should insulate it from the worst consequences of its full-spectrum abandonment of working-class interests.

Neither the Lib Dems nor the Greens have enough momentum to break out of their more or less marginal role in electoral politics and the SNP are to soon experience the downside of FPTP when their slim majorities are eroded by Scottish Labour.

Up to a third of registered voters don’t vote in British general elections — but when working-class voters get something distinctive to vote for, this goes up. The highest turnouts were in the post-war “welfare state” elections. Jeremy Corbyn’s 2017 manifesto gave both the Labour vote, and thus turnout, a boost.

The overwhelming desire to see the back of this Tory administration may be enough to give Labour a parliamentary majority.

The issue then becomes what it might do in the absence of a policy mandate to do very much.

Marx finished his analysis of the 1852 general election with the words: “The bribery and intimidation practised by the Tories were, then, merely violent experiments for bringing back to life dying electoral bodies which have become incapable of production, and which can no longer create decisive electoral results and really national Parliaments. And the result? The old Parliament was dissolved, because at the end of its career, it had dissolved into sections which brought each other to a complete stand-still. The new Parliament begins where the old one ended; it is paralytic from the hour of its birth.”

He might be writing this very day.