The Tories used to stand for stability – now they’re the party of chaos | Owen Jones

With Brexit, everything from the economy to the union is under threat. Do the Conservatives know what they have done?

A party committed to defending the economic interests of rich elites could never win by saying so. After the advent of working-class suffrage, Conservatives had to have an offer for everyone. There would be room at the top for those who laboured hard, they promised. We will keep out the foreigners and harshly punish the criminals. We will be uncompromising in our defence of the union. We will be defiant against external foes. But a mainstay of Tory propaganda was always this: we are a bulwark against chaos, the custodians of economic security. Scare-mongering about Labour's chilling threat to the economy was even deployed against Tony Blair, a man who posed no serious threat to Thatcher's consensus: the Tories' 1997 slogan was "Britain's booming - don't let Labour ruin it". So look now as the Tories prepare the biggest economic shock imposed by a British government in modern history. How can they ever deliver their finger-wagging lectures on economic credibility ever again?

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