Amid the unfolding financial crisis, most commentators have adopted the same line as Keir Starmer; that the government has ‘lost control of the British economy’.

Yet unlike the leader of the opposition and the mainstream media, the Prime Minister and her advisers understand class politics. When we adopt that same way of viewing events, it seems that, just as she insists, everything is going according to plan. It is a plan with two related goals: plundering the public realm and undermining trade union power.

It was obvious to anyone familiar with financial markets, even the former Chancellor Rishi Sunak, that the measures presented by his successor, Kwasi Kwarteng, would cause chaos. This was the ‘mini’ budget’s intention. The extent of the panic it aroused in markets may have been underestimated, as evidenced by the Bank of England’s return to quantitative easing to prop up the pension funds. But as Truss’s round of regional radio interviews demonstrates, she is quite happy for the Bank to do this heavy lifting in order to pursue her goal of borrowing to fund tax cuts for the rich.

These cuts, however, are just a tasty hors d’oeuvre prior to the main course. The budget makes government borrowing more expensive. Conservative ministers will present this as an excuse for slashing public spending. Already, departments are being asked to find ‘efficiencies’. The Chancellor’s statement scheduled for 23 November, outlining spending plans, is likely to be brutal, potentially imposing austerity on an even more crippling scale than the Osborne/Cameron years.

From this point on, the real exercise in plutocracy begins. Private companies may be offered favourable terms to deliver all sorts of services, up to and including GP appointments and aspects of primary years education. People may be charged at point of use. The exact mix will be known soon. As the Covid crisis has shown, when awarding contracts, preferential treatment will be given to friends and donors of the Tory party.

This is why it would be a mistake to view these developments through the lens of ideology alone. Both Truss and Kwarteng are contributors to the infamous Britannia Unchained, and Numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street are now populated by acolytes and associates of the right wing think tanks based at Number 55 Tufton Street, the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) chief among them. However, these ‘charities’ only receive their secretive funding because their benefactors believe that the groups will influence government policy in way that enriches them. Now they are doing more than influencing policy—they are making it. Those funders are already getting very rich (not least by short selling the pound). This is the essence of plutocracy.

These groups, then, view ideas as tools. But they remain useful, and their development can surprise us. An understanding of the state as merely a vehicle for enrichment has characterised these think tanks since their foundation. This is largely a product of the influence of the Virginia School of Public Choice on their worldview; just one ingredient in a soup of neoliberal ideas on which they live. Its key figure, James Buchanan, who worked closely with the IEA, regarded economic policy as essentially the outcome of a struggle between competing social interests. He wrote that ‘in any given period of time, a specific group exerts political power, and the individual members of the whole group may be classified into two broad categories, the governing and the governed. Fiscal activity is to be explained solely in terms of the behaviour of the ruling group.’

When he wrote this, in 1960, he regarded the ‘ruling group’ as organised labour and their allies in the US Federal government, who were becoming increasingly concerned about welfare and redistribution. Doubtless, labour was never as powerful as he feared, but today there can be no doubt that the ruling group is organised capital and the representatives in Downing Street.

Buchanan arrived at his theory of the state as a cash dispenser after spending time in Italy in the late 1950s. While there, he encountered the work of Italian theorists such as Antonio Viti di Marco, Vilfredo Pareto, and Maffeo Panteleoni. All were committed to particular versions of free market economics, but each also recognised that the state could be used as a means of funnelling wealth to the already wealthy: they recognised the plutocratic potential of state power and policy. When Buchanan took up their ideas, however, he directed them solely against the working class. The theory of public choice Buchanan and his collaborators advanced was meant to delegitimise public expenditure and so reverse the progressive material and political gains that had been won.

It was this same approach that informed the work of the IEA and its imitators. For the first years of their existence, they sought to frustrate progressive policies. However, from the 1980s onwards, with organised labour having been severely weakened, especially after the miners’ strike of ’84-85, they looked to put the state to its plutocratic uses. Privatisations and the introduction of business into the public sector swiftly followed. The results are all around us, from a broken railway system to sewage-strewn beaches.

The ‘mini’ budget opens the door to much more of this. This time, however, private capital will intrude even further into public life. The ‘family silver’ of gas, water, electricity, and the rest, has long since been sold. Now the very care and learning we provide to each other as a society will be packaged up and auctioned off.

Equally important for organised capital and their representatives in government will be the effect of the ‘mini’ budget on trade unions. Making strikes illegal was part of the promise Truss made to the 160,000 Tory members in her recent leadership campaign. The UK is already in recession. The rise in interest rates she and Kwarteng have secured is likely to produce a wave of unemployment. They hope that this will undermine the bargaining power of a newly resurgent trade union movement and allow bosses to keep wages low even as the cost-of-living rockets.

To properly understand the chaos unleashed by Truss and her Chancellor, we must recognise it for what it is: an exercise in plutocracy and an assertion of class power. Things, for them, are going according to plan.