By David Osland

“We are all Thatcherites now,” Peter Mandelson pointedly argued in an article in The Times more than two decades ago.

Those of us who weren’t Thatcherites then, and aren’t Thatcherites now, had an obvious retort on that one: speak for yourself, mate.

But the Prince of Darkness knew exactly what he was doing using those five words, and displayed commendable strategic purpose in dropping the soundbite in a column written for the flagship publication of the Murdoch press.

The assertion was naturally drowned in tortuous syntax, arcane economist-speak gibberish and all-purpose get-out clauses, if only to guarantee subsequent wiggle room.

But at bottom, it represented a calculated provocation, paralleled by his other noted one-liner, which celebrated his intense relaxation about people getting filthy rich.

These are two classic examples of what the jargon of the era called ‘political crossdressing’, an expression that more recently falls unfortunately on the ear.

Smart politicians were seen as free to expropriate their opponents’ home turf, because the core vote had nowhere else to go. Or so we were told.

Keir Starmer has this morning dusted off this anachronistic tactic, delivering a speech to the annual gathering of the overarching alliance of the Labour right that one newspaper reported under the headline “Labour are the real conservatives, says Keir Starmer”.

The most charitable construction here is that the Labour leader didn’t quite go that far. What he did clearly contend is large-C Conservatives no longer represent small-c conservatism, and Labour now does.

Here Starmer is referencing the writings of eighteenth century political thinker Edmund Burke, the founding father of conservatism as a coherent school of thought.

Burke’s essential insight was that conservatives conserve; Starmer’s premise is that they no longer do.

“We must understand there are precious things – in our way of life, in our environment, in our communities – that it is our responsibility to protect and preserve and to pass on to future generations.

“And look – if that sounds conservative, then let me tell you: I don’t care,” the Labour leader said.

“The Conservative Party can no longer claim to be conservative. It conserves nothing we value – not our rivers and seas, not our NHS or BBC, not our families, not our nation.”

On one level, Starmer is not wrong. As more intelligent Tory commentators have long pointed out, the present Conservative Party repudiated its Burkean legacy long ago.

The abrupt turn to classical liberalism came almost half a century ago, when Thatcher reoriented her party towards a creed that is corrosive of the very values one-nation conservatism purports to uphold.

More recently, that doctrine has been augmented by rightwing populism and the current fad for the authoritarian and highly nationalist US import that styles itself as national conservatism.

Burke’s ideology is not a corpse socialists should seek to resurrect. His most well-read book, Reflections on the Revolution in France, received near-instantaneous refutation at the hands of the Hanoverian left’s one-man instant rebuttal unit, Tom Paine.

Karl Marx later dismissed Burke as “an out-and-out vulgar bourgeois”, a mere hired pen, a slightly superior Simon Heffer.

Socialists of course want to protect the environment, reinforce community and rebuild the NHS. That latter goal, incidentally, will scarcely be furthered by additional private sector involvement. But it is the words “our way of life” that are doing the work here.

The way of life conservatism seeks to conserve is the class system. Burke was – as even his most recent biographer, Tory MP Jesse Norman, admits – the enemy of popular sovereignty.

He wanted the widest possible chasm between power and those he derided as “a swinish multitude”, a designation by which he derided people like you and me.

The number of voters who care about precision in the use of philosophical labels is vanishingly small. But while few will click on the link for the full text of Starmer’s speech, there is an intended takeaway at work here.

Just as Peter Mandelson’s grandfather Herbert Morrison famously declared that “socialism is what a Labour government does”, the everyday language sense of conservatism is what Tory prime ministers do in office.

The message is that there will be no fundamental change to British society. All the swinish multitude need do is show the requisite gratitude for slightly more public spending and employment rights, while the billionaires continue to prevail.

Starmer’s speech is also notable for its pledge to undertake a change in Labour’s DNA, brought about by a device dubbed “Clause 4 on steroids”.

There is this odd fixation on the Labour right that the only road to victory is by way of administering repeated sound thrashings to the left, much as if we were miscreant boarding boys at a minor league Victorian prep school and in need of character formation.

Neil Kinnock’s 1985 Conference podium attack on the Militant Tendency remains venerated as the best thing since sliced Trotskyists, even though two electoral defeats subsequently followed.

But the chief reference point is Tony Blair’s decision to abandon the commitment to common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange nine years later.

Starmer has promised to take us “further and deeper”. The snag here is that changing the DNA of a living organism, at least once it leaves the test tube, is currently beyond the scope of humanity’s scientific capabilities.

A more feasible development is the roid rage-driven destruction of the Labour Party we have now and the creation of something new in its place. That’s no small ask, and would mean the mother of the mother of all battles to bring about.

Opposition to the Tories goes well beyond the organised left. Plenty of people who are not particularly politically engaged lend their support to Labour every four or five years or so, primarily because they reject Tory values.

What they will hear from today’s speech is that Starmer wants them to embrace those values.

At a time when the electorate is rejecting conservatism as it is generally understood, ‘vote Labour for real conservatism’ might not prove as smart a slogan as its proponents seem to think it is.

David Osland is a member of Hackney North & Stoke Newington CLP and a long-time left wing journalist and author. Follow him on Twitter at @David__Osland

Image: Edmund burke. Source: https://picryl.com/media/portrait-of-edmund-burke-after-sir-j-reynolds-4f0782. Licence: Public Domain Mark 1.0