THE deep institutional and political crisis gripping our country introduces — for the parents of the new political generation — a sensation similar to that experienced by the veterans of the defeated Chartist movement who saw in the late 19th century socialist and trade union renaissance their youthful dreams given new life.

The socialist song “England Arise, the long, long night is over” gave one voice to this reawakening. In Wales and Scotland the same sentiments found a distinctive national expression as British imperial power began to feel the competition from its continental and North American rivals and the stirrings of colonial revolt.

Today, as then, the constant recomposition of capital continually transforms the world of work and the social and political forces that express its contradictions. This proceeds in secret, unseen, the changes barely noticed until a slow accretion of these contradictions burst forth.

The election of Jeremy Corbyn is the most distinctive expression of these processes. The political verities which conditioned the thinking of almost all tendencies within the labour movement were overturned in a few weeks in such a profound way that when we see on TV the once ubiquitous notables of New Labour they appear as relics of a lost era.

This is as true for the petrified remains and manic stare of Tony Blair as it is for the rotting hulks of Gordon Brown’s considerable intellect which once was embedded in Scotland’s socialist tradition and is now deployed only in an undignified effort to turn the tide within Labour.

As Marx puts it: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

For the political class — for the professional opinion shapers of the media, for the security, intelligence and military establishment, for the top Civil Service, for big business, for the bankers and City grandees — that which they hold most holy of all was profaned by the Brexit vote.

This signified the re-entry into politics of the forgotten class and in the biggest turnout in any ballot precipitated a political crisis which appears without end and without even the prospect of a resolution. The old politics is truly broken.

I write these lines from Italy from where the contours of our crisis seem intensely parochial but emblematic of a wider crisis of legitimacy in the European Union.

Italy’s government is composed of what we might term a right-wing populist and essentially racist Lega and an intransigent “anti-system” Five Star Movement. The coalition of these unlikely bedfellows came about precisely because the compromise which allowed the Democratic Party — the denatured residue of Italy’s once almost hegemonic Communist Party — to take its turn in government finally ceased to function.

The Democratic Party (PD) combined many of the former communists with a wing of Christian democracy less compromised by corrupt clientelism and less entwined with the pervasive network of church, crime and the secret sinews of the coercive state machine. In moving so far from its revolutionary origins the PD has become the main political expression of Italy’s entanglement with the EU. In doing so it has shed much of its left wing.

The Lega, originally a regionalist party of the more developed north, refashioned itself as a national formation to cannibalise right-wing votes in the South. Under the leadership of Matteo Salvini — who has skilfully repackaged the narrow chauvinism of his mythical northern Padania into a national vehicle for that section of Italian enterprise most discomforted by the EU’s orientation to monopoly power — it is the most powerful political machine in Italy.

Opinion polls show that the election result — which saw M5Star harvest 32 per cent, a substantially larger vote than the Lega at 17 per cent — has been reversed in the European elections.

Thus deputy premier Salvini, a distinctive product of Italy’s singular political culture, has acquired a new international legitimacy. He sealed his disregard for the disdain which the heads of EU states customarily display towards his politics with a Washington appearance alongside US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

As La Repubblica, Italy’s liberal daily put it, he has “reaffirmed that Trump remains, for him, a point of reference, commencing with the economic recipes.”

La “manovra trumpiana per l’Italia” is the telling phrase.

In harvesting votes, both the Lega and M5Star played, in different ways, with a complex Italian framing in which EU membership is seen as an antidote to the archaic and anarchic corruption which exists as a permanent feature of Italian capitalism. It is seen, as well, as an imposition, as the project of a metropolitan political class and, as in Britain, an entity onto which all manner of grievances are projected. The malign consequences for Italy of the dominance within the eurozone of northern European, or more precisely German, capital is a subterranean current in much of the political discourse.

M5Star secured big votes with a well-received if imprecise promise of a guaranteed income. In the South where employment is precarious, marginal and allocated often through recommendation this was a vote winner. A pledge to reverse a pension “reform” which hit the working class and poor proved very popular.

Lega weighed in with talk of a “flat tax” guaranteed to appeal to anyone with income to conceal.

The budget thus envisaged would, on the coalition’s own account, have resulted in a small increase in debt as a proportion of GDP but still within the EU’s 3 per cent limit. But the European Commission demands of all members states a year-on-year reduction. The 3 per cent cap is conceived not as a ceiling but a starting point for continual reduction.

EU finance ministers meet on July 9with the Italian issue before them.

On the table is an immediate proposition that the Italian government cut spending and institute a VAT rise — this regressive tax will hit working-class families hardest. The two signature election pledges — reversing the pension “reform” and introducing the guaranteed minimum income — are on the Commission’s hit list.

Last December as this conflict was brewing, the “yellow green” coalition gave way to the EU “recommendation” that €10 billion be sliced off the welfare budget.

While Salvini was laying his “Trumpian” smokescreen in Washington his coalition partners were hiding behind rather opaque discussions with the Commission.

Some insight into the direction which these talks are taking lies in the remark by M5Star’s deputy premier that the guaranteed income measure “will remain — perhaps rebalanced in relation to the needs of the EU.”

The coalition’s July Days will come quickly enough at which point the Italian people will get to see more sharply than before the real sinews of power before which their “sovereigntist” administration will either give in to the Commission’s demands or become the first government of a European Union state to confront the EU’s infringement procedures.

This ever-tightening vice permits the EU to fine its disobedient member state and withhold structural funds whilst the obligation to contribute to the EU budget continues.

Salvini, having made himself the first among his now unequal partners, is finding his rhetorical powers stretched to the limit with his only get-out the path to capitulation already opened up by last December’s spending cuts.

In the political role-play the nominally left-wing president of the republic is finding a consensus with the actual premier Giuseppe Conte, the finance minister Giovanni Tria and the M5Star vice-premier Luigi Di Maio in order to accede to the EU diktat.

M5Star’s virtual online base — plundered from the PD’s electorate — has a diminishing purchase on the policy direction of its political representatives, now gone native in their newly acquired ministerial roles.

Meanwhile the Democratic Party’s remaining support finds itself fodder for a full scale submission to the logic of continuing EU membership. Nicola Zingaretti, the PD chief, has the burdensome task of finding some unity among the party’s many currents — each of which has no answer to the impasse in which the country finds itself.

We can see parallels with Britain precisely in the realities of power exercised within the framework of the treaties to which our nominally “sovereign” governments have subordinated themselves.

The commission, through its negotiators, has been ultra keen to make Brexit the most painful and protracted business possible, both to extract the highest price if Britain’s negotiators were to prove serious in their intent and, equally importantly, to discourage other states from allowing a popular vote.

The almost comic incompetence of the Tory government has handed the EU’s Michel Barnier a negotiating advantage of unprecedented utility. The comic opera parties of the Italian coalition present a hardly more convincing picture of sovereigntist resolve.

The keynote policies on which they were elected cannot be implemented while Italy is subject to the EU treaties and neither the nominally Italian government nor the opposition has an answer to the problems thrown up in this new situation in which popular expectations cannot be met without the triumph of a popular sovereignty.

How this could express itself when the official PD opposition is the formation most committed ideologically to the EU project shines a light into the problems a Corbyn government might face if its programme is held hostage to the Commission.