TOMORROW is a chance to elect a socialist prime minister in the country that gave the world Thatcherism and Blairism.

It is a historic election on a par with 1979. Every effort up to 10pm will make a difference.

However the results stack up, the campaign has already revealed fundamental fault lines. Among them is a crisis for the politics of the capitalist class and for the ruling bloc in Britain that has held such control for so long.

The crisis that will continue after the election is summed up in this extraordinary contradiction. While dozens of billionaires are bankrolling the Tory Party, leading ruling-class figures entered the final week of the election bewailing that they did not have a party and potential prime minister who would be reliably aligned with big capital in Britain.

Thus you have had a string of interventions calling for a hung parliament and urging a kind of “Goldilocks tactical vote” — just right to block either Jeremy Corbyn or Boris Johnson from getting a majority.

Former prime ministers John Major and Tony Blair addressed a well-heeled anti-Brexit meeting to deliver that message. We are used to Blair undermining Corbyn and Labour at every opportunity. But it is unheard of for an ex-Tory prime minister to do likewise to his side.

Major threw his weight behind former Tories David Gauke and Dominic Grieve, now standing as independents after being kicked out of the party by Johnson.

So did the Financial Times. It mourned how both Labour and the Tories had been taken over by “extremists” and that the Lib Dems’ campaign has been one car crash after another. It urged support for candidates on a case-by-case basis according to whether they back the liberal-capitalist, pro-EU “values” of the main thinking organ of British capital.

Lower down the ranks of influence, Will Hutton in the Observer on Sunday put much the same case.

His intervention is not significant in itself — and his claim that his editorship of the Observer in 1997 and call for tactical voting then was a significant factor in Labour’s landslide is self-delusional.

But he did succinctly spell out the reasoning of the “campaign for a hung parliament.”

It is to deprive Johnson of a majority (so that he cannot “get Brexit done”) but equally to ensure that if Corbyn leads the biggest party, then he will be able to implement only “the most feasible and least contentious elements of its programme — but will deliver the vital second referendum on EU membership.”

By “most feasible and least contentious” he means some of the commitments to increased capital investment and infrastructure spending in Labour’s manifesto.

From Britain to Germany serious business commentators say that the austerity squeeze has failed and that printing cheap money has not led to productive investment. It has not arrested the decline of vital infrastructure. Any employer in Manchester with workers commuting on Northern Rail would actually like the trains to run on time — or even at all.

What they don’t want is for this to be paid for through a redistribution of wealth towards working people. They do not want any encroachment upon ownership and control of key parts of the economy, such as rail and energy.

Above all, they don’t want the strengthening and expansion of union rights and organisation that is a plank of Labour’s programme. When they warn against “going back to the 1970s,” their great fear is not the (pro-boss) policies of the Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan governments. It is the spectre of the militant working-class movement that shattered the first attempts at Thatcherism by the “Selsdon Park” Tories in Ted Heath’s cabinet.

Their problem is that the “rational capitalist” elements of Labour’s programme are entwined with a commitment to a fundamental shift in favour of working people and by a party whose leadership wants to go in a socialist direction.

On the other side, they have a Tory Party that is certainly committed to capitalism but is led by a gang of deranged Thatcherites who on the Europe question (and a few others) are at odds with the settled policy of corporate Britain.

One FT columnist sought to address this week how it had come to this. Robert Shrimsley wrote: “The lesson of this wretched election is clear. Under this voting system, moderates need to stop dreaming of creating a British En Marche [President Macron’s start-up party in France] and join the major parties and fight to reclaim them. If mainstream politics is to prevail again, centrists will have to become entryists.”

But placing the blame for the failure of the Lib Dems and Change UK almost exclusively on the impact of the first past the post electoral system underestimates the depth of the political problem for the capitalist class. There is a crisis of liberal-capitalist politics across countries with very varied voting systems.

The Lib Dem advance from 1997 to 2010 (and especially at the 2005 election) was not that of a “centrist” alternative to a left Labour Party.

On many issues the Lib Dems posed to the left of New Labour and also broached — albeit in a non-socialist way — a modest questioning of Blair’s infatuation with very rich people.

Some will remember how successive New Labour home office ministers’ demonisation of asylum-seekers sheared off a chunk of support.

The Lib Dems posed as a decent liberal alternative. That is how they took Barbara Roche’s seat in London.

Even bigger was the Iraq war. Charles Kennedy positioned them in opposition, leading a Lib Dem contingent on the February 15 2003 demonstration.

That brought significant advances in 2005. Already in 2001 there had been the lowest turnout ever at a British general election, under 60 per cent.

New Labour was so right wing that the Lib Dems had almost the whole width of the pitch to play at being a more left and radical alternative (though they also, particularly in the north of England, engaged in right-wing, localist attacks on Labour).

The problem for them now is that what liberal-capitalist thinkers call the natural centre of British politics, a constructed middle 50 per cent that ought to be reflected in party terms, is a projection of their imaginations and thin social layer.

On so many issues not just the Lib Dems but also the notional “centre party” are to the right of average opinion.

Nationalisation of utilities and greater working-class control in various areas of their lives are “the centre” of public opinion — but are opposed by “centrists.”

Additionally, the most motivated anti-xenophobic layers are beyond just euro-cosmopolitanism, a purported internationalism that stops at Africa, Asia and Latin America.

They are for solidarity with refugees, against Fortress Europe, and with an understanding of racism that looks at policing and the state, not just at the Faragist social attitudes of a minority.

Millions of working people are looking for a dramatic improvement in their real lives — right now — not to jargon about a modest “fiscal expansion.”

That political reality is going to hit the centrists’ efforts to reclaim Labour and the Tories as much as it has the vapid Jo Swinson’s Lib Dems.

But that will not stop them pushing for it very hard from Friday morning onwards. Their Goldilocks scenario is such a badly hung parliament that no party leader could readily form an administration.

Enormous pressure could then be mounted for all of them to resign in favour of a “moderate” prime minister resting on a cross-party combination of MPs.

Far-fetched that may be in the immediacy. But it is in keeping with the profoundly anti-democratic thinking behind this longer-term scheme to exhume Blair-Cameronism.

The appointment of a prime minister whom no-one would have voted for to hold that position, and on a liberal-capitalist programme that was not put to the electorate in a manifesto.

Whatever the result, concerted efforts to reconstruct the fabled centre are already taking place.

And that means especially in Labour. A row about whether to focus on that or upon manufacturing a new centrist party was part of the blow-up of the so-called People’s Vote campaign.

The bigger the Labour vote, the better. In any case there is going to be a fight to preserve and extend the advances the radical left has made — and hopefully will in government.

The other side of this is the serious breakdown of the ruling class’s political mechanisms of control — or of hegemony, as the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci put it.

His notion of the “integral state” highlighted how the coercive mechanisms of the capitalist state machine rely on buttressing through an array of social institutions (including political parties) that forge consent to capitalist rule.

For most of the last 100 years the Tory and Labour parties have done that in complementary ways.

That has significantly broken down at a time when there is a popular desire for change and a ruling class wish for a modest repositioning, but without an instrument to achieve it.

This is indeed a historic election and moment. Vote Labour. Prepare to fight for control, by and for working people.