What kind of government the UK has got puzzles political observers. Is it the technocratic dictatorship of former UK Chancellor of Exchequer Jeremy Hunt? -they ask.
Is Prime Minister Rishi Sunak hugging French President Emmanuel Macron, or UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman banging up "invaders"?
It depends on how people look at the shape British politics has taken since 2010. Of the party that has run the country since then, a simple story is usually told. It goes thus: from 2010 to 2016, the Conservatives were a well-spoken and professionally run centrists' club. True, there was some unpleasantness over spending cuts.
Then came Brexit, which made the Tories mad, bad and utterly cack-handed. They became hard-right Trumpettes, waging inane Culture wars and peddling blatant lies. In the 12 years between David Cameron and Boris Johnson, they went from Davos-man centrists to broken-brained Brexiteers. And so to Sunak, who has become the man many in the political classes hope will mark a return to Grownup Government.
A nice tale. It's just a shame it isn't true, commented London dailies. The dailies commented that Sunak's anointment was a big moment for race politics in the UK. Braverman's war on migrants is also a big moment, but it doesn't get half the column inches. From Priti Patel to Kemi Badenoch, diversity is always hymned by the newspapers - even as they ignore how black and brown ministers are regularly used to front up attacks on black and brown people.
Many of the faces, from immediate past British Prime Minister Liz Truss to Secretary of State for leveling up Housing and Communities Michael Gove, have stayed the same over the last decade.
Former British Chancellor of Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng's supposedly radical plan for growth took up former British newspaper editor and Chancellor of Exchequer George Osborne's ideas of corporation tax cuts and ditching the top rate of income tax. He merely deployed them at breakneck speed, as if setting all the coalition budgets.
The greatest element missing is the kind of austerity economics that will be imposed on the country's next budget to discipline poor people and protect the rich, with a fresh wave of authoritarianism.
The Tory halves banned protests and locked up for a year those who take part in protests.
They are accused of stealing people's money, robbing their right to protest and taking away their right to strike too.
The very the same prime minister who just days ago stood on the steps of Downing Street and promised "integrity and accountability" is pressing ahead with two separate legal attacks on the rights of workers to take industrial action - even allowing drafted-in agency staff to break strikes.
Pre-Brexit liberal Toryism stands accused of trying to get out from underneath the pulverising post-2016 draconian monster.
Sunak, who as chancellor made an annual £1,000 cut to universal credit just as the cost of living emergency took grip, is cut from the very same cloth as Braverman, who wants to clamp down on climate protesters for something as trivial as making too much noise.
They are not different breeds of Conservative. They both protect the interests of the wealthy, the company bosses and mega asset-owners against the rest.
Authoritarian austerity, is an ideology with a long and terrible history.
In a new book titled The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism, the economic historian Clara E Mattei reminds readers that the greatest austerity the UK ever faced was not under Osborne or Margaret Thatcher but in the early 1920s, when Whitehall slashed spending in short order by 20 per cent, Wages cratered, while the economy was crippled for most of the decade. The technocrats at the Bank of England acknowledged: "The process of deflation of prices … must necessarily be a painful one to some classes of the community", which at least is more honest than declaring, as Cameron did, that "we're all in this together".
The working classes in Britain emerged from the massacre of the Great War demanding universal healthcare and public housing. Forced impoverishment saw off those demands and tamed the radicals.
It was not just that the government clamped down on the right to protest; as Mattei writes, austerity "foreclosed alternatives to capitalism". It shut down the public's political imagination.
Mattei points to the fact that Mussolini posed as an austerity politician when he took power. "Thrift, work, discipline … the budget has to be balanced as soon as possible," he declared in his first speech in parliament. His ministers were inspired by the spending-cut politics practised in the UK - talk that was lapped up by the Times and the Economist. At the Bank of England, an extraordinary memo went round, which has been unearthed by Mattei. Titled Fascist Italy - Fascist Methods, it argued: "The Italian people are the descendants of Roman slaves … Mussolini and his Fascists seized power and restored order … and the people are reduced to the servitude which had been their lot for a score of centuries."
Austerity is a one-sided class war, conducted in numbers and defended by economists' jargon. And when that fails to do the trick, dissenters can be silenced. Already, one can see the forces of law and order mustering.
Ex UK Prime Minister Theresa May's former right-hand man, columnist and former chief of staff Nick Timothy making strongly protests in his column against "weak policing" at the UK borders and Deputy Prime minister Dominic Raab, favouring British human rights laws to be ripped up entirely.
A clampdown on public finances, a crackdown on public disorder: the two went together in the 80s, in the 2010s - and these are what lie ahead now.
Brexit didn't change the Conservative Party: austerity was as heartless under former British Prime Minister David Cameron and former newspaper editor and former Chancellor of Exchequer George Osborne as it is under current Prime minister Rishi Sunak.
The Conservative Party, officially the Conservative and Unionist Party and also known colloquially as the Tories, is one of the two main political parties in the United Kingdom.
A Tory is a person who holds a political philosophy known as Toryism, based on a British version of traditionalism and conservatism, which upholds the supremacy of social order as it has evolved in the English culture throughout history. The Tory ethos has been summed up with the phrase "God, King, and Country".
