What happens to our explanatory/predictive models of UK politics if we drop the assumption that the Tories are actually committed to preserving the Union, as opposed to say, maximising resource extraction and shoring up their power in a breakaway South-East rump state?

There are obviously plenty of Tories/Tory voters who are avowedly committed to preserving the Union, but the tides of opinion have a tendency to change all at once, when strategic realities involved in other commitments align in ways that cannot be ignored. What else is Brexit?

The Tories as a unitary political force haven't decided to turn the South East into Singapore on Thames, ringed by commuter belts and pocked with internal ghettos from which precarious essential labour can be drawn, but they also haven't been a unitary force for a while now.

Insofar as there is any ideological project left in the party, it's not the austerity-forward consolidated unionism of Cameron, but the dynamic 'classical liberalism' of Rees-Mogg and Cummings: new wave of post-industrial economic interventionism disguised as liberalisation.

This project hasn't really coalesced yet, at least not in a way that's visible in public, but this is the rough intellectual vector of finance capital eager to abandon the pretence that London is anything but the core enabler of global capital flight and its associated dynamics.

In some sense it's worth looking at The City within the city of London as an autonomous entity directing and distorting the political processes around it. It's outlived every political formation it's been embedded in, and put down every upstart competitor (e.g., Birmingham).

Dublin fought back, and now Edinburgh, Belfast, and Cardiff are agitating for greater autonomy, which will most likely mean independence and re-entry into the EU for the first two. The only long term alternative is a new federalism or renewed forms of central domination.

Of course, there's Boris's own brand of divide and conquer One Nation Toryism, which successfully broke what remains of the demographic compact that might have let to a Corbyn government, and won't be healed by the promise of a Starmer government. But this Toryism is incoherent.

The new wave of Tory MPs from deprived post-industrial areas in the North of England and elsewhere are largely idiots. Ascribing any political strategy to them is stupid, and Boris is only marginally better. Low cunning has let him fail upwards, but there's nowhere else to go.

It's unlikely that the combined economic catastrophies of COVID and Brexit will endear him to the deprived areas he's courting, because he's not smart enough to follow through on the promises he's making. His greatest strength is Starmer's abject political cowardice.

I'm still a Labour Party member, for my sins. I was as enthused by the Corbyn project as the next millennial, and as crushed by its failure too. I'm not planning on leaving, unless they kick me out for tweeting truth to weakness (they'd got little power to speak of, or to).

But I'm now committed to thinking about the long arc of the century we find ourselves in, rather than capitulating to the endless rehash of late C20 politics still being peddled over a decade after the financial crash exploded every ideological illusion of liberal technocracy.

This means beginning from the imminent collapse of the economic conditions maintaining the tacit social contract encoded by the Union. That means that the long term choice for the regions, as articulated by @Alex_Niven, is between a new federal compromise and independence.

This means seeing our opponents for what they are, even if they don't yet see themselves in such historical terms. It largely doesn't matter how they see themselves, only the tangled webs of complicity they tie themselves and others in, and the direction they're driving us in.

Consider this a promissory note for thinking through the long-term shape of politics in the UK, and in my own region (the North East) specifically. If you like the direction of these thoughts, maybe check out 'Uncanny Solidarity' ( https://deontologistics.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/uncanny-solidarity.pdf). Till next time