THE Tory Party is clearly in chaos, as shown at their conference.  Their poll ratings do not suggest that they can easily recover the situation and win the next election. As a result, personal ambition rather than key ideological differences are creating even further divisions inside the party.

But they are all united in pursuing a vile and reactionary campaign of increased racism.  

The headlong charge into the sewer is being led by the Home Secretary, who is happy to peddle complete lies in order to pursue her racist agenda and her own personal ambitions.

But it should be noted that no senior Tory publicly criticised her and it was even said that Rishi Sunak personally approved her utterly divisive speech. Either that is the case, or he is too weak to reprimand her after the event.

The truth is that the Tory Party as whole supports a racist agenda going into the next election and is happy to ramp up the rhetoric in support of it. Without anything else, they are running on a racist ticket.

From the Tory Party perspective this is a natural outcome of the party’s  crisis and a reactionary flag they can rally around. It is a product of the cul de sac they have led the economy into. Growth remains elusive, price rises remain stubbornly high, living standards are falling and public services are in crisis.

Their response to this is essentially a warmed over version of Thatcherism, with deregulation and tax cuts for the rich supposed to get us out of this mess, even though, along with privatisation, they are the policies that have led us here. Outside of a piecemeal privatisation of NHS services, which is ongoing, they can identify little that is not already privatised. 

No-one seriously believes cutting or scrapping inheritance tax will foster economic growth. All it will do is create another shortfall in government revenues.

Similarly, the idea of cutting welfare payments has nothing to do with improving public finances. Its purpose is effectively to starve people into taking low-paid jobs, which will especially hurt disabled people.

So, the increasingly racist rhetoric led by the Home Secretary is a conscious strategy of distracting the population from the disastrous effect of the Tories’ own terrible policies.

The effect is twofold. The first effect, of course, is to increase the misery and oppression of black and Asian people in this country. Lives are ruined and ended prematurely with this rhetoric and these terrible policies. At the same time, it shifts the political agenda away from the crisis and onto reactionary territory which blames others for the effects of Tory policies.

It is the “dead cat” electoral strategy so beloved by the Tories’ election strategist Lynton Crosby.

The cutting edge of the racist campaign is the completely misconceived pledge to “stop the boats.” But Suella Braverman was lying when she said that most people arriving here on small boats from across the Channel are economic migrants. 

The data from her own department the Home Office shows that between 75-80 per cent of all asylum-seeker applications are eventually granted, after much unnecessary delay. These people are desperate and they are genuine refugees.

The demonisation of these poor people completely ignores their reality, and the upheaval in their homelands. This is caused by war, repression, persecution, climate change and many other factors that Western countries such as Britain have done so much to foster.

The widespread claim that opponents of this draconian system have no alternative policy is completely untrue. And the supporters of government policy know it.

Many of us have long argued that the creation of safe and legal routes to come here should be created. 

In northern France this would mean the creation of a British asylum application processing centre, which the French authorities have said they would allow. This would obviate the need far any dangerous crossings as, once the application is granted, the refugees would be able to travel here by legal means.

This would save lives and deprive the people traffickers of the vast majority of their client market. But it would also deprive the Tories of their main tool for harvesting votes.

There is a permanent Tory campaign against migrants and migration, despite presiding over record legal net immigration numbers.

Yet anti-migrant campaigning is only the current cutting edge of the Tory racist campaigning. It would be a mistake to not recognise other key aspects and fight against them. 

This includes racist policing, whether it is the disgusting case of the treatment of Child Q and other overwhelmingly black children who have been strip-searched in our schools. 

It also includes discriminatory stop and search and deaths in custody. In the case of Chris Kaba, an unarmed man fatally wounded by police shooting, we have had both the Home Secretary and the Metropolitan Police Commissioner effectively arguing that police officers should be above the law.

But because racism is so pervasive in our society, almost every backward step under this government will exacerbate the discrimination experienced by black and Asian people, whether it is underfunding our schools, discrimination against lower-paid patients in acute NHS care, the housing crisis or Jeremy Hunt’s threats to cut benefits. All of them will hit black and Asian people harder.

In a recent large survey, the vast majority of black Britons, well over 80 per cent in each case, said that discrimination in education was the biggest bar to black attainment, that they had experienced racism, including in the workplace, and that they did not trust the criminal justice system.

All of this under a government which claims that institutional racism does not exist, ignoring the evidence of people’s lived experience and spouting nonsense that this is “the best place in the world to be black.”

Naturally it is in the vital interest of the labour movement and the Labour Party to oppose each and every one of these manifestations of racism, and the Tories’ crude efforts to intensify them.

One of the reasons that the Tories are able to make this sharp right turn is that these policies and this rhetoric are not being challenged by Labour’s front bench.

There was no criticism of Braverman’s lies about economic migrants. No push-back against her Enoch Powell-like claims that we are facing a “hurricane” of international migration.

Instead, the shadow home secretary’s criticism was of the Tories’ failure to stop the boats, and failures on knife crime or on shoplifting. This is an attack on the most reactionary Home Secretary of the modern era, but politically it is to her right. 

This is morally bankrupt. It is also politically foolish. 

We can never outdo the Tories by competing with them on their reactionary and racist agenda. Some people in Labour have tried this in the past and it did not end well for them. 

Reactionary Tory voters simply do not believe us.  And, often completely ignored, a large section of our own voters are disgusted by this.

We must never concede to the racists.

Diane Abbott is the Independent MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, and has been an MP continuously since June 11 1987.