NICK TIMOTHY was chief of staff to Theresa May during her floundering premiership. Now he is an even more worried man.

His new gig is writing for the Daily Telegraph, the readers of which are treated to a steady stream of apocalyptic warnings from its columnists. Mostly these blame familiar targets — the woke, the French, Brussels, the Civil Service “blob” — for impending calamity.

But Timothy has sprung a surprise. He blames the state of Britain squarely on capitalism. It is quite the indictment. He points out that businesses have been focused on pushing down wage rates, taking advantage of the weakening of trade unions to do so.

“But wages are not the only way in which capitalism is in crisis. In Britain, everything seems to be in the red: we have a trade deficit, a budget deficit, and a house-building deficit.

“At the heart of all these changes is a model of globalisation that has caused the economic elites of the West to get richer, and which has allowed millions of people in Asia to escape poverty, but which has also relentlessly and systematically damaged the interests of the Western working — and increasingly middle — class.”

There’s more. Timothy states that “austerity went too far and for too long” and then he takes aim at that easiest of targets — the “shameful story of the water companies.” At this point, you need to check that the paper you’re reading does not have a big red star and “for peace and socialism” on the masthead.

The Telegraph pundit only comes unstuck when he warns that “turning a blind eye to the failures and excesses of capitalism — especially the crony capitalism we have brought on ourselves — makes defeat to left-wing parties more likely.”

That should be so. However it will not happen — not at the next general election — for the presently insurmountable reason that no left-wing party is standing, at least not one with any chance of forming a government.

Today’s Labour Party offers only more austerity and leaving all the rest of the pathologies identified by Timothy very much as is.

Most people now probably have a better sense of what Keir Starmer will not do — scrap tuition fees, nationalise utilities, tax the rich, invest in the green new deal and so on — than what he will.

That is why a recent Financial Times article was headlined “Britain is facing a ‘hopeless’ election” — one in which no hope is being offered by any contending party to the beleaguered electorate, after 15 years of wage-cutting and devastation of public services, compounded by burgeoning profit-driven inflation.

It is now clear that the bond market crisis which drove Liz Truss from office also terminally spooked Starmer and his shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves, leading them to discard whatever shreds of radicalism, inherited from the Jeremy Corbyn years, they still clung to.

They fear that any attempt to address the problems pressing in on the people, at least any solution involving the deployment of public resources, will provoke similar money market apoplexy.

By ditching any idea of taxing the rich and big business they have foresworn the obvious means of addressing any temporary deficit ameliorative measures would entail. At this point, it is game, set and match to the moneyed Establishment.

Indeed, according to one weekend report, Starmer has now gone so far as declaring that he “isn’t interested in hope and change.” This establishes that even the habitually mendacious blurt out the truth sometimes.

So the next election will not offer a choice of programmes, only of executors. The FT’s Martin Wolf bleakly observes “Labour deserves a chance. But it does not offer answers we need. Maybe, nobody can. If so, the future looks grim.”

The common response to this on the left is to say that the struggle must then move to the streets or the workplaces.

That is absolutely true as far as it goes, which is somewhere — but not far enough. We are in the midst of a continuing wave of industrial action, the most serious and hopeful for a generation or more. It has been driven by high inflation on top of a decade-long wage squeeze.

But it has not yielded any political articulation as yet. The Labour Party leadership remains obdurate in its refusal to adjust its agenda to accommodate workers’ anger, even on the immediate industrial issues.

The boldest attempt to extend the impetus of the strikes, Enough is Enough, seems to have stalled for want of a discernible strategy beyond supporting disputes which will eventually come to a conclusion anyway.

Apparently, Enough is Enough secured the email contacts of around 700,000 people in the enthusiasm surrounding its launch. That is quite a resource, yet it is hard to see what use it is being put to.

The movement against austerity and its enduring damage is not at the level it was a few years ago, somewhat demobilised under the twin excitements of Brexit and Corbynism. And the anti-war movement is at nothing like the required level, given the most dangerous war for decades is going on.

All this establishes is that workplace and street struggles are necessary, but not sufficient, absent a clear political articulation.

Thus the left is stuck in an extremely familiar position, between the implausibility of achieving anything within an authoritarian hard-right Labour Party and the insuperable difficulties in constructing a plausible class-based alternative to it.

Unite leader Sharon Graham, successfully urging her union to remain within the Labour Party rule book, told its Rules Conference that “Labour must be Labour and the union must push them into that position ... We must make them take different choices.”

There certainly isn’t an obviously better strategy on offer but, like any other plan, it needs to show results to remain credible. There will be the rub.

So where is the hope indeed? One source is to be found in the class enemies’ despair — witness Timothy’s acknowledgement that the system he champions is failing on every metric. Or Wolf’s view that anyone believing that things can only improve “shows a lack of imagination.”

We are not weak because they are strong. The strikes underline there is no lack of working-class combativity, the 2017 election showed that left policies can be popular, and the initial response to Enough is Enough demonstrated that masses of people want to fight for a different future.

A modest start in assembling the jigsaw of hope would be for the different campaigns, groups and organisations on the left to talk to each other with a view to reaching a workable unity behind a political alternative.

Such a project may not succeed, but then hope never comes with a guarantee.