The scope of Tory graft and corruption is legendary - the modern Conservative Party is very much its spawn. It has run the racket with the seal of Empire and Crown since the days of the East India Company.

Richard Desmond sits in a long tradition of robber-barons using venal officials like Jenrick to enrich himself at public expense. The colonial capitalist system by its very nature concentrates dictatorial power in the form of brute wealth in the hands of the few - which Desmond used to opt out of his social responsibilities by dangling a £12,000 donation before the Tories. It is incredibly telling that private texts have shown that he wanted to make sure the “Marxists” of the local council didn’t get “doe for nothing [sic]” - displaying an enormous condescention for working-class Londoners, as well as a dumb inability to distinguish between communism and the mildest civil social democracy. This sordid affair saved him an estimated £50m in property taxes, which would have been spent on vital frontline council services.

He must be torn down. The Tory Party must be torn down. Capital itself must be torn down.

Poor Republicans: We voted for Trump because he posed as anti-establishment and spoke to the forgotten working-class.

Corporate Democrats: So, uh, you guys are all racists, right? I’m hearing you’re all racist. We’re super racist. Waaaay more racist than that Trump amateur. Amy *loves* to lock up black dudes. Joe, holy crap, you should hear what he mumbles off camera. Vote for our guy, he’s a real scumbag.

We must grasp that the Black American voting bloc who routinely align with the corporate Democratic Right are not ‘conservative’ or 'the establishment’ - it represents something altogether more complex and specific.

Partly are a layer of community leaders - often elderly warriors of the civil rights era - who have been successfully co-opted by the Democratic Right, buying into the notion that the Democratic Party represents the institutionalisation of the gains won by the near-civil war of the '60s, come hell or high water. This layer is buttressed by genuine material gains for their class: positions in local government, petit-bourgeois business interests etc. This class was itself left monolithic after the physical dismantlement of the Black Panther movement by the repressive institutions of state: having thinned the revolutionaries from the ranks, the remainder were more easily subsumed.

But far deeper (and I’d argue far more numerically superior) are the large numbers of African-American voters - particularly in Red states which see the highest levels of racist harrassment of young black men, the most obscenely skewed justice systems and the like - who are actively and consciously choosing the devil they know because the stakes are higher for them than we privileged intellectuals can comprehend.

The answer on how to reach those voters is quite straightforward - although monumental in proportion. Socialists simply must do better in offering security and protection for black working-class communities from state violence and victimisation. Not in the abstract or legal sense - the only way that those communities will have their fear broken is through independent class action: self-organised mutual aid societies, community defense organisations and activist opposition to racial injustices.

This isn’t something that can materialise overnight, and it may well be something that is too large to be tackled in the course of one Presidential campaign. But the nascent 'political revolution’ of Bernie Sanders can provide a springboard to unite all of the disparate struggles fought by black communities into a more coherent politics to put material, social form to the slogan 'Black Lives Matter’.

Liberalism requires believing both that the interests of financial aristocrats should heavily influence all policy decisions via the language of ‘efficiency’, 'stability’ and 'viability’, and also that the selfsame 1% is an unheard minority that needs defending at all costs.

The reason investors are panicking isn’t because COVID19 is a particularly bad pandemic - that’s only the proximate cause.

Capitalists have made their own bed. For decades, successive governments across the West have undermined universal welfare states by privatising, strangling funding and casualising working conditions - in pursuit of profits. At the same time, the political degeneration of stable neoliberal regimes into authoritarian managed democracies with tendency towards right-wing populism has promoted ill-equipped cliques to power who have little capacity for (or interest in) stable, effective government - cf. the Trump administration or the post-Brexit Tory Party.

When taken together, we have a beautiful cocktail: eroded, tottering public health systems led by uninterested, incompetent leaders, faced with a modest public health challenge.

No wonder governments have spectacularly failed the ruling-class’ vote-of-confidence on their efficacy.

To whit: the compulsory requisition of productive property owned by corporations, banks and individuals whose estates profited from slavery and the trans-Atlantic trade, and its democratisation in service to poor black communities as an immediate measure towards redistributive reparations.

Socialist politics are really only ‘divisive’ between those who profit from human misery and those who don’t.