Having lasted only 44 days as Tory leader and Prime Minister, Liz Truss belatedly bowed to the inevitable on Thursday and resigned from both roles. Not only did she fail to surpass Brian Clough’s similarly ill-fated tenure as Leeds United manager in 1974—she could only equal it—she was also outlasted by a lettuce, placed in front of a webcam for the amusement of the internet by the Daily Star as Truss’s mounting difficulties made her (and, increasingly, Britain itself) a global laughing stock.

Truss had tried to save herself by sacking Kwasi Kwarteng, her Chancellor, for implementing policies she had previously backed to the hilt. Kwarteng’s mini-Budget last month prompted finance capital to throw a fit; the pound slumped and government borrowing costs spiked after a run on gilts. This was passed on to homeowners and first-time buyers in the form of higher mortgage costs—political kryptonite for a party so reliant on rising house prices and buy-to-let rentierism. Still, at least Kwarteng’s old boss, Crispin Odey, made a killing.

There was plenty to object to in Kwarteng’s mini-budget, not least its proposal to scrap the 45p rate of income tax for top earners. But it is unlikely that this is what caused financiers to take fright: rather, the plan to cap household energy bills at around £2,500 a year, its cost estimated at anywhere up to £200 billion, no doubt aroused greater concern. Indeed, Kwarteng’s replacement, Jeremy Hunt, was quick to decree that this support would be cut for most households—now facing astronomical bills of over £4,300—in the spring.

Kwarteng’s defenestration and replacement by the more pliable Hunt—an unthinking neoliberal with no particular ideas of his own—placated the markets, but mortal damage had been inflicted on Truss, forced to drop most of her own programme and sapped of whatever political authority she had. The farce peaked when she tried to turn a Labour motion on fracking—highly unpopular in both the true-blue shires and the Red Wall—into a de facto vote of confidence, her whips allegedly strong-arming recalcitrant MPs into the voting lobby.

Certainly, it would have taken a heart of stone not to laugh at Truss’s predicament. But as Charlie Winstanley pointed out, her effective toppling by financial markets and her replacement by Rishi Sunak—the bankers’ stooge—shows where real power resides, and how little of it ordinary voters actually wield. It is probable that any government led by Jeremy Corbyn would have been met with even greater hostility from the same quarters—if, that is, his own parliamentary party hadn’t couped him before the markets could.

Centrist pundits clutched their pearls in horror at the prospect of rank-and-file Tory Party members electing another Prime Minister, demanding that MPs alone be given the privilege (as if their judgement isn’t abysmal). But there is, predictably, no outrage at the prospect of yet more public spending cuts—hitting the most vulnerable hardest—which nobody has voted for, imposed by the diktat of finance capital; far from it, the fervent hope among the bien-pensant commentariat is that such ‘normality’ and orthodoxy might now be restored.

Labour, among others, is demanding a general election. Any Tory MP who voted for one would, as things currently stand, risk calling time on their own career in doing so; the mini-budget and ensuing chaos soon reduced the Tories to little more than a smoking crater in the polls. It is hard to overstate how disastrous recent polling is for them: one poll suggested that the Tories would be reduced to just five MPs if an election were held now. Nobody expects anything like this to materialise, but the Tories surely won’t take the chance.

What’s tragic is that when so many are in urgent need of a radical alternative, there isn’t one. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is busily touting itself as a sensible, managerialist B-team, playing up its ‘fiscally responsible’ credentials. Starmer himself told the Trades Union Congress that a future Labour government could not ‘take any risks with the public finances’ and that the situation would remain ‘really tough’ (though he didn’t specify for whom). It took long enough, but it appears we finally have a Starmer pledge we can believe in.

Though the Starmer clique might envision itself as a steady hand on the tiller, centrist technocracy is likely to prove drastically inadequate to the moment we’re in. The next Labour government, assuming there is one, will inherit a sclerotic economy, public services visibly creaking after many years of neglect (the NHS in particular), worsening environmental destruction and widespread, severe hardship. There is nothing to suggest Starmer’s Labour even recognises the scale of the task it faces, let alone that it is equipped for it.

For all the understandable delight at Liz Truss’s downfall, the battle over what comes next is only beginning. Those facing agonising decisions over whether to heat their homes or put food on the table this winter are crying out for wholesale social change, but all they’re being offered is thin gruel. If all the Westminster parties are going to give us is a ‘choice’ between austerity with a blue rosette or austerity with a red rosette, it’s surely up to the rest of us to—as a matter of urgency—build a mass movement able to take the fight to both.