At first, it might seem strange that the issue which eventually brought down a prime minister was shale gas fracking. The economic value of the industry and its capacity to bring down energy bills in the long term are at best unclear (and probably insignificant), and it comes with myriad safety concerns ranging from earth tremors to water contamination so serious it is has been linked with health problems in new-born babies.

To make it a ‘confidence issue’, as the Tories did on Wednesday evening, is a remarkable hill to die on for a nascent industry which many of the big players in energy had given up on years ago. Instituting a ‘three-line whip’ meant that many MPs who had for years been against fracking in their constituencies were compelled to vote against a Labour motion which called for a parliamentary vote on banning fracking across the country—a ban which the Conservatives had implemented prior to the 2019 election and had promised (in their manifesto) to maintain ‘unless the science shows categorically that it can be done safely.’

Given the amount of policy u-turns that Liz Truss had gone through already, a volte face on fracking should have been the easiest. Instead, there were accusations that MPs were being ‘manhandled’ into the voting lobby. Both the Chief and Deputy Chief Whip (responsible for making MPs vote with the party) were said to have resigned after the vote (which the government won), though this was then denied by the prime minister’s office. Truss was perhaps already doomed, but this was the final nail in the coffin—and on Thursday she resigned, after only 45 days in office.

The issue of shale gas, though, has long proven a problem for Tory leaders. Cameron and Osborne were incredibly supportive of fracking, and they worked with the industry to provide payments to communities and households near fracking sites as well as removing several regulatory barriers. As Chancellor, George Osborne sent a series of ‘asks’ on behalf of the industry to ministers, and they appointed the chairman of fracking company Cuadrilla to the post of Lead Non-Executive Director for the Cabinet Office.

They were, however, in a coalition. Liberal Democrat Energy Minister Ed Davey conceded to the government support of fracking, in exchange for strong overall emissions targets. He did, though, introduce the ‘traffic light system’ in response to earthquakes at a fracking site in Lancashire, which includes strong limits on seismic activity caused by sites. It is this system which has prohibited the UK’s main fracking site at Preston New Road, which had to stop its tests when they caused earth tremors. Despite agreeing the initial limits, the industry is now demanding those limits are changed.

Once the Tories got a majority in 2015, they took a more authoritarian approach to shale gas. They used direct ministerial interventions to declare the need for shale gas and to influence national and local level planning processes, supressed reports which showed the negative impacts on the rural economy, and proposed that shale gas decisions were taken out of the hands of local authorities and made at a national level.

It soon became clear that the latter proposal would not command the support of enough MPs, and once the Preston New Road site caused damage to property with small earthquakes, the writing was on the wall for shale gas. Boris Johnson, someone who understands the Tory base, recognised that fracking was an unnecessary challenge to their electoral chances in many important constituencies, and the Tories introduced a fracking ban before the election in 2019.

The reason that shale has proved such a problem for the Tories is that it exposes a tension between the coalition of interests the Tories represent: fossil capital and the asset rich. On the one hand, Tories like Liz Truss (who used to work for Shell) instinctively want to support fossil fuel extraction, and Truss invited many of the fossil fuel industry’s most aggressive lobbyists into Downing Street.

On the other, what the last decade of government interventions for fracking show is that fracking sites antagonise Tory voters who are (with some justification) worried about their house prices taking a hit if they live near fracking sites. The anti-fracking movement has been incredibly adept at mobilising these interests, along with those concerned about climate change, against the industry. Indeed, when the government tried to remove shale gas decisions from local planning processes (where they were likely to be rejected), they managed to antagonise groups like the Campaign for Rural England who represent many of the people that loyally vote Tory.

The issue of fracking, then, forces the Tories to choose between the interests of fossil capital and the interests of the people that actually vote for the party, whose wealth has increased over the last decade due to policies like quantitative easing, which also serve the interest anther one of the Tory Party’s masters: finance. For finance capital, and by extension homeowners, land is primarily an asset, and asset inflation is a key part of the UK’s rentier capitalist economy. For fossil fuel and other industrial capitalists, specific sites and locations are required to extract or produce manufactured goods. The presence of these sites, though, can undermine the speculative and rentier value of land as an asset—this even extends to the service industry, forced to close venues in cities due to noise complaints.

Shale gas was a smart choice for Labour to make the subject of the debate, showing not just the Tories’ division but also their long-term inability to reconcile these tensions. Cameron’s government went all in on supporting finance but starved the economy of investment and demand, before calling a referendum for a Brexit which has smashed UK exports to pieces (bad for industry). Theresa May tried to rebalance towards industry, with attempts at an industrial strategy for the first time in years and attempts to keep within the customs union in her Brexit deal. Johnson promised to ‘level up’ through creating new industry while introducing barriers with the UK’s largest trading partner, but was unable to drive through the deregulatory planning reforms he thought were necessary to do so.

For Truss, though, shale gas fitted within her Thatcher cosplay routine. When Thatcher came to power, she introduced a similar suite of interventions to counteract inflation, based on now discredited monetarist theory. She increased interest rates and cut taxes and government spending, creating three million unemployed and destroying the UK’s industrial base. She was able to pull this off because her reforms coincided with a boom in North Sea oil and gas, which filled the Treasury with tax revenues to pay unemployment benefit and to reassure the markets. Truss saw shale as her North Sea, as one means of rejuvenating industry and growth while dealing inflation.

Shale was never going to fill this role economically, but also it brings with it the problems in the Tory base. Due in part to Thatcher’s reforms towards a ‘home owning democracy’, any action which could affect house prices is a worry to MPs, as Truss learned this when she released her mini budget. Truss’ wider economic plan (lacking the oil and gas boom) managed to hit both mortgage prices, pensions funds and the cost of government debt. She faced the wrath of the financial markets for promising tax cuts funded by borrowing, rather than austerity. Unsurprisingly, Tory voters realised that she was a threat to their wealth and the Tories’ polling rating collapsed dramatically.

It would be a fitting end to the story of shale gas in the UK as the issue that finally brought down Liz Truss, as it is emblematic of how the Tories have been unable to reform capitalism in the face of ecological crisis. With fracking, as with much else, they failed to deliver neoliberal reform to make institutions (planning) more friendly to capital, supported their plans with increasingly authoritarian interventions, and ended up ditching the plans to appease their reactionary voter base and keep the asset price gravy train going.

The present situation is one of stagnation. The Tories tried the orthodox neoliberal playbook in their mini budget and got punished by financial markets, though mainly because they forgot about public sector cuts. The invasion of Ukraine and Covid-19 have ended the flow of cheap money and threaten the asset price boom. Unwilling to invest, unable to make even neoliberal reforms, the government is drifting back to austerity as the compromise that will please the financial markets and underwrite the profits of energy providers and fossil fuel extraction. They continue to buttress this political and economic stasis with draconian legislation, like the Public Order Bill, to restrict the inevitable dissent to the crisis. The next Prime Minister may choose to drop the toxic pursuit of shale gas, but the ideological and material tensions shale gas has exposed in the Conservatives’ political base may prove too noxious for even the ‘natural party of government’ to stay in power.