You used to know where you were with the Conservatives. They were the party of big business, of the union, of the police, of the Church of England.

The latter can still accurately be described as the “Tory party at prayer”: a large majority of Anglicans plumped for Theresa May’s party in the 2017 general election. But the institution has drastically shrivelled, and since the 1980s successive archbishops of Canterbury have savaged unjust Tory policies, from Robert Runcie – whose condemnations of Thatcherism were labelled “pure Marxist theology” by a Tory cabinet minister – to Rowan Williams’ fusillades against the Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition. The lying, philandering likely successor to Theresa May is not, let us put this gently, exactly the embodiment of traditional Christian values.

While the Tories’ programme of tax cuts for corporations and privatisation will only ever benefit big business, its pursuit of a hard Brexit and the rightwing populist takeover – pithily summed up by Boris Johnson’s “fuck business” – are unmooring it from its natural social base. As for the union: the metamorphosis of the Conservative and Unionists into an overtly English nationalist party began under David Cameron, and now both Scottish independence and Irish reunification could be made more likely if it elects Boris Johnson and pursues a hard Brexit. As a recent poll of Tory members found, 63% would prefer Scotland to leave the union, and 59% to see Northern Ireland do the same, if it meant Brexit happening (then again, over half would accept the destruction of their own party for the same ends).

Then there’s the police, established in its current form by Robert Peel, one of the fathers of the modern Conservative party. In the early 20th century, the British establishment made a terrible error in not paying the police properly, leaving them with a similar wage packet to unskilled workers or agricultural workers. Months after the Russian revolution – and during a period of mounting domestic labour upheaval – the Metropolitan police went on strike, causing government panic. “Unless the mutiny of the Guardians of Order is quelled,” the prime minister, David Lloyd George, told Tory leader Bonar Law, “the whole fabric of law may disappear.” The police trade union was banned, the Police Federation – a company union – was established, and crucially, police pay dramatically hiked. Margaret Thatcher learned this lesson, too: one of her first acts upon becoming prime minister was to approve a 45% pay rise, and the loyalty of the police force during industrial struggles earned them the epithet “Maggie’s boot boys”.

How things have changed. A letter to the Times signed by former Metropolitan police chiefs warned that police resources had been “drained to dangerously low levels”, and damned “the virtual destruction of neighbourhood policing” and the slashing of police and support staff by over 30,000. May herself was famously angrily heckled by the Police Federation in 2012 when she was home secretary over her cuts – she had denounced their “scaremongering”, and slashed their real-terms pay. No longer fearing an insurgent labour movement, the Tories concluded that the police were now expendable.

That does leave a question for the left: does it fill the vacuum, and become the champions of the police? To that answer there should be a quid pro quo: a reversal in cuts to pay and to some jobs in exchange for profound reform. For example, the former Met chiefs criticise the watering down of stop and search, but the evidence shows it does not work, and dealing with institutional racism and building a better relationship with minorities must be a priority. Equally, it is facile to blame rising violent crime entirely on police cuts, rather than a general policy of austerity that has attacked living standards, stripped away secure and skilled jobs, closed youth clubs and left young people in particular without hope.

Yet the transformation of Toryism into a populist English nationalist party is grimly fascinating. Although it was Thatcherism that first moulded it into an ideologically charged political force, Conservatism is now evolving at a rate of knots. What a tragedy, then, that we are lab rats in this sordid experiment.

• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist