The municipal elections in Austria’s second-biggest city, Graz, were a political earthquake. The victory of the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ) shows a categorical rejection of the hated bourgeois establishment that has managed the city for years, and opens up a perspective of a broad offense against social welfare cuts and an end to Graz’s tenure as a private investors’ paradise.

With petrol pumps across Britain running dry, and gridlock on the roads, the Tories are lurching from one crisis to another. The anarchy of the market is causing chaos to workers’ lives. All the ingredients are being prepared for a social explosion.