Dan Hodges, once a flunky for the air industry, is a PR spokesperson for the Labour Right. During the leadership campaign, he distinguished himself by predicting 1 out of 0 victories for the elder Miliband, and was dubbed "the Carole Caplin of the David Miliband campaign" for his troubles. He felt that the Comprehensive Spending Review was a humiliation for Labour not because of Labour's complicity in making it possible, and not because of what it will do to Labour's base, but because Labour's stance was not completely dictated by the Tories' position: "Come on. We know how this game is played. Match their overall spending totals, and hit them over priorities within that framework. At the same time ensure there are no uncosted spending commitments."

So, that's Dan Hodges. Now he's in the New Statesman, prophesying civil war - ironically, this article is itself a shot in the civil war that the Labour Right launched as soon as the leadership election was decided. And his argument is that the "Brownites" - that's Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper, two cabinet members known for wanting to take a harder line against the cuts - are out for Ed Miliband's head. It will be Ed out, and Yvette in, if they get their way.

Now I know what you're thinking. Why do I care about these petty personality-base debacles? And if that was all that was at issue, I'd agree. I'm not a member of the Labour Party, so I don't have an immediate stake in such matters. But look at what the Blairites have been doing lately. Alan Johnson, whom Miliband installed as Chancellor on the basis of an old saw about tents and pissing, has been publicly going against the leadership on the 50% higher tax rate, saying that he would like to drop it in a few years, and that it's only a tactical response to the deficit. In truth, he is among those who thinks it was a mistake to ever introduce this popular measure.

Now, the Blairites are in The Times, calling for an end to the union link. Alan Johnson is involved again, attacking the legitimacy of Ed Miliband's leadership by attacking the way he was elected. He claims to favour the extension of "one member one vote", neglecting to note that if the principle was applied seriously in the Labour Party, Ed Miliband would have come a clear first in the first round, and Diane Abbott would have come third. Alan Milburn is making the logic explicit, however, in demanding that union affiliates don't get a vote, and that the structural relationship with the unions is abolished. Margaret Hodge, who owes everything to the unions behind the anti-fascist campaigns that worked their fingers to the bone in Barking, is also calling for Labour to cut "the umbilical cord". There's gratitude for you.

If the Blairites were to get their way, Labourism would be dead. That's what they appear to want, and why it doesn't seem to overly perturb them that in going along so slavishly with the cuts agenda they will destroy the constituencies that keep Labourism alive. Ed Miliband, with few radical ideas and a deficit of guts, was nonetheless the candidate for those who wanted to oppose the Blairite mission. He was the candidate who promised to rebuild the Labour base, to defend trade unionism and strengthen the link. That's why his victory left Blairites reeling, fuming, plotting a coup from the off. That's why rich donors like Lord Sainsbury went off in a huff.

Ed Miliband's supporters on both the soft and hard left have called more than once for him to hammer the Blairites. Crack the whip, said Seumas Milne, and make the Right toe the line. Now, there's some faint hope that his decision to 'retire' Ray Collins as general secretary signals a determination to get tough, and purge the ruthless right-wing fixers and allow a real debate in the Labour Party. Collins was known, says Left Futures, for ensuring that any policy proposal discussed at any but the lowest levels of the Labour Party was in tune with what the leadership was thinking. He was certainly part of the disastrous witch hunt that threw Lutfur Rahman out of Labour, causing the party to lose an election for Tower Hamlets mayor that they would otherwise have easily won. And it's hard to believe that the subsequent manoeuvering to get Ken Livingstone booted out for having supported Rahman, and blockade the new East End mayor by refusing to cooperate with him at either a local or London-wide level, would have taken place without Collins' express consent. But while a different general secretary might avoid such obvious embarrassments for Labour, there's little prospect of anything fundamentally changing. The Labour Left is kidding itself if it thinks it's key strengths will flow from any processes inside the Labour Party, where they have been disenfranchised, bullied, witch-hunted and demoralised for a generation now.

John McDonnell is far more realistic. The real social forces that will provide a base for the Left, and thus potentially revitalise Labourism, will not come from the clapped out media-savvy think-tanks of the centre and soft left. They certainly won't come from the small clique of supporters around Ed Miliband. They will come from the very people that Labour's right-wing old guard least understands, and most dislikes - trade unionists, protesters, climate campaigners, and so on. The students whom Ed Balls denounced, and the strikers whom Ed Miliband has preemptively warned will not receive his support. They are the only real power that is capable of taking on the Blairites, whose legitimacy and authority is built on defeat, on acquiescence and conformity, and on deference to the media and public relations flacks.

If you want to understand the relationship between conservatism and capitalist modernity, you could do worse than consult the Canadian marxist C B Macpherson and his brief guide to Edmund Burke. The apparent paradox of Burke is that he is a defender of aristocracy, of tradition and hierarchy, a scourge of liberal revolutionaries, a natural law conservative, at the same time as being a bourgeois liberal, a pro-market Whig and a vehement opponent of British imperialism. It is true that conservatism gradually integrated aspects of liberalism throughout the 19th Century so that, in its dominant Angl0-American variant, it eventually became a more ardent defender of classical liberalism than the liberals of the 20th Century. But Burke was there at the beginning, as it were - along with Joseph de Maistre, a founder of modern conservative thought, such that his paradoxical embrace of aspects of liberalism can not be treated as merely part of that adaptive process. His liberalism, and his modernism, were always-already constitutive of his conservatism.

Macpherson intriguingly suggests in his introduction that the key to resolving this conundrum is Burke's support for capitalism:

"There is no doubt that in everything he wrote and did, he venerated the traditional order. But his traditional order was already a capitalist order. He saw that it was so, and wished it to be more freely so. He had no romantic yearning for a bygone feudal order and no respect for such remnants of it as still survived, notably in the royal household ... He lived in the present, and made it his business to study the economic consequences of actual and projected state policies. As MP for Bristol (1775-80) he could scarcely have done otherwise, for Bristol was then one of the greatest commercial ports in England. But his interest in economic affairs had, as we shall see in some detail, begun earlier and lasted longer than his connection with Bristol..." (C B Macpherson, Burke, Oxford University Press, 1980, p. 5).

In chapter five, he draws this out further, but it is necessary to further elaborate on his market liberalism, as well as his hierarchical conservatism. The former manifested itself earlier in his career, the latter after the French revolution. From his earliest undergraduate polemics on political economy in Dublin, Burke's position on the rights of property was impeccably bourgeois, as befitted a member of the Ascendancy. He was no leveller, but he believed that the owners had a duty to "improve" their property, to augment their own wealth and thereby increase the wealth of all classes. For this reason, he was to find himself far more at home in England, where most landowners were commercial proprietors, than in Ireland, where absentee landlordism was still rife. He was taken up by literary London, joining the 'Club', among whose luminaries was Adam Smith, and taking up residence in Grub Street (though, in a rather more august capacity as a writer than the street is notorious for). His entry into politics was equally facilitated by a superior taking him under his wing, when William Gerald Hamilton MP asked him to be his private secretary. As a bourgeois, he owed much of his career to patronage, and later to the accomodating abundance of 'rotten boroughs' that enabled him to be 'elected' as MP for Wendover by grace of Lord Wendover.

It was Burke's career as an MP that marked him out as a moderate Whig, a reformer, and an opponent of colonial abuses. His liberalism was as opposed to a priori reasoning as was his later conservatism. Rejecting abstract accounts of liberty, as he had earlier rejected Rousseau, he denied that freedom bore "any resemblance to those propositions in geometry and metaphysicks, which admit no medium". Liberty in real social life was "variously mixed and modified, enjoyed in different degrees ... according to the temper and circumstances of every community". This anti-theoretical approach informed his response to the American revolution, in which he urged the British government not to see the abstract virtues of liberty, but the concrete virtues of a peace obtained by tolerating liberty in some degree. Consistently, against inductions from general principles, he posed complex empirical reality, the frailty and imperfection of human beings, and the hard reality of "human nature" about which he held bourgeois assumptions. His assumptions about human nature provided the foundation for his principled attack on Irish penal laws, for he maintained that the law was of necessity grounded on two aspects of the human condition: equality of original condition, and rationality. The law must therefore apply equally to everyone within a given polity, and must be of use to the whole of society.

If the law was to apply equally, and be of use to the whole of society, this had some ramifications for Burke's views on property. For the law must protect property, the better to further industry for the benefit of he commonwealth. Any law that abridged the rights of property, in just that proportion also curtailed the propensity toward industry. But if private acquisitiveness benefited society by stimulating industry, and if Burke was happy to defend the rights of property no matter how it was originally acquired, he was not content with property-holders who lacked industry. His attack on the Duke of Bedford, provoked by the latter's attempt to deprive him of a pension in his retirement, displayed bourgeois resentment of lazy aristos in gloriously contemptuous prose. His pension, he noted, was a reward for "merit", while the Duke's holdings were his despite his "few and idle years", and his inability to "know anything of public industry in its exertions".

So, from the ground of "human nature" to the lofty principles of law, economics and justice, he was a thorough bourgeois. But the bourgeois revolution in France produced, apparently, quite a different Burke, the Burke that is most familiar today from his Reflections on the Revolution in France and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event. The latter part of the title is of course crucial - it was that the French revolution was being held up as a model for Britain to emulate which inspired Burke to produce his conservative manifesto. The revolution, the "plague", must be quarantined - and if this quarantine eventually called for an all out war by 1796, on an ideological level it entailed detailed elaborations on the nature of society, and government. The sacrosanct position of property, and of inheritance, was above all what he sought to conserve. He did so by citing, or rather inventing, a tradition grounded in transcendent principles. He noted that in English law, liberty was itself "an entailed inheritance, derived to us from our forefathers", in contrast to the French revolutionary assertion of liberty from natural right. Liberty, along with privilege, peerage, the crown, property, franchises, etc., were all heritable goods, and all goods worth conserving. Such principles did not exclude gradual improvement, but they did exclude radical innovation which was likely to be motivated by a selfish spirit. Institutions of longevity having demonstrated their worth, their utility for the whole of society, ought not to be overthrown in a fit of revolutionary pique, by the fiat of revolutionary pick-axes. If the sentiment is clear, Macpherson claims, the logic is not: a prolonged sequence of momentary choices is not logically superior to a single momentary choice. The distinction between small changes, of which Burke approves, and large, qualitative changes against which he sets himself is not clear. Burke's argument amounts to a case for prejudice in favour of tradition.

But that tradition is that of the Leviathan state, the subjection of all to the rule of the sovereign, the constitutional impediment to natural passions that human beings enter into by tactic acquiescence. The "real" rights of man are those which he derives from having submitted to that rule, most particularly the right to property, to the fruits of the labour mixed with his property, and to the inherited accumulations of that property. All men, he agrees, have "equal rights", but "not to equal things" - a man with five shillings on his person has as much right to that as a man with five hundred pounds. And "as to the share of power, authority, and direction which each individual ought to have in the management of the state, that I must deny to be amongst the direct original rights of men in civil society; for I have in my contemplation the civil social man, and no other. It is a thing to be settled by convention." Convention, then, has proved the unequal rights of man to property and to say in government. It has produced a "natural aristocracy", a leisured and cultured class whose entitlement to privilege, and whose usefulness for society as a whole has been proven over generations. Moreover, it has established a set of rights, differing for each man according to his concrete specificity, which it would be irresponsible to deny to future generations through some radical overthrow of the old order.

What is continuous, then, what unites the market liberal with the hierarchical conservative, is capitalism. Burke was a bourgeois political economist about whom Adam Smith is said to have claimed that he was the one man to have thought exactly the same way as Smith himself without having conversed with him. It was as a bourgeois economists that he sought to defend his property, his estate of some six hundred acres, against the possibility of non-market-based payments to labourers. In neighbouring Berkshire, the Justice of the Peace in Speenhamland had introduced a system of supplementary payments for workers depending on the size of their families to alleviate the distress caused by the market - it was payment according to need rather than industry. Scandalised, and afraid that the government might nationalise such a policy, Burke argued that such policies by arbitrarily curtailing the rights of property would undermine enterprise, thus ultimately leaving workers worse off. It would, in a word, create a culture of dependency. By contrast, free markets were ultimately the most efficient and equitable means of distributing the social product. Burke did not defend a feudal system of small producers selling surplus product on the market, but specifically a capitalist economy with the drive for accumulation as its motor. He held that it reflected the natural propensities of humans, and that it was thus an inevitable expression of human aspiration. He was happy for capitalists to accumulate surplus since this would compel them to be interested in the welfare of their workers, and to reinvest the surplus in further production for the good of all. He was equally insistent that the able-bodied must all not merely work, but work as wage labourers, since this alone would provide the surplus that would drive on further accumulation and improvement. That labour should be a "commodity like any other" whose price fell and rose according to demand was "in the nature of things".

Burke, it should be said, was fully aware of how much bourgeois society had to answer for. He was aware of the great social misery that it produced, since he documented it in some detail. But to all this, he insisted that it would be "pernicious" to follow his own instinct to "rescue [the labouring poor] from their miserable industry", since it would disturb the "natural course of things" and inhibit "the great wheel of circulation". That wheel of circulation was divinely ordained, every bit as much as the right of monarchs to rule - in a formula mirroring Smith's "invisible hand", he insisted that: "the benign and wise Disposer of all things ... obliges men, whether they will or not, in pursuing their own selfish interests, to connect the general good with their own individual success". The free contract between employer and labour was also a customary status, a convention deriving from natural law, an expression of divine will, and thus of necessity providential and tending toward social harmony. For, in such a contract, he maintained, there was no possibility of conflicting interests - it was in the interest of the farmer "that his work should be done with effect and celerity", which would only be assured of his labourer was well-fed, clothed, healthy, etc. This did not merely imply, but vociferated, an attititude of subjection toward the worker. The relationship between the labourer and his employer was analogous to that between the beast and the labourer, or the tool and the labourer. In each case, the latter stands as the executive, reasoning authority, that directs his subordinate man, beast or tool to his higher ends. To "break this chain of subordination in any part" was "absurd".

Thus Burke the conservative, the propagandist of hierarchy and natural law, is nothing if not a modernist, a bourgeois, and a liberal. His 'tradition' is an invented one, I need hardly add. Capitalism was no more in the natural order of things than monarchs or pontiffs. But it was an invention convoked in his intellect by the challenge of the French revolution, and the egalitarian menace that it promised. Had he been, Macpherson suggests, a 19th Century historian with the benefit of hindsight, he might have moderated his position on the French revolution, seeing that it might expand the dominion of capital. But as it was, he saw only the immediate, urgent battle between the classes. Therefore, his foundation of modern conservatism, of reaction against liberal egalitarianism, is motivated by the desire to conserve the kernel of liberalism, capitalist social relations, against the rationalist dilations of liberty and equality that were infecting the salons of London, rousing the labouring poor, and threatening precisely the "absurd" disturbance of subordination in England, in the very countryside where he resided, that he so dreaded.

The other day, Clegg was making grandiose comparisons between his little bundle of reforms and repeals, and the Great Reform Act of 1832. The analogy would seem to be as absurd as the spectacle of a bunch of rather grey, suited Whigs trying to impart some sort of radical edge to their Grey-era liberalism. On the other hand, Paul Foot used to mockingly point out that the 1832 reforms left the vote concentrated among 2% of the population - thus were only 'great' in the sense of unavoidably shifting political power from the landed gentry to the urban bourgeoisie. The changes abolished some rotten boroughs, and created new constituencies for rising industrial centres, but maintained a property-based voting system which ensured that those who voted were also those who ruled. So, the legacy to which Clegg is appealing is not particularly democratic - if anything, it was a legislative effort to contain the revolutionary democratic pressures of both workers and middle class radicals who, it was feared, might withhold their taxes and use the dough to purchase an arsenal or two. It marginalised rather than empowered the working class majority.

And whatever reform agenda that Clameron's cluster coalition ultimately spews up will also exclude workers in a very particular way: there will be no talk of repealing undemocratic anti-union laws. The laws as they stand enable employers to pursue vexatious legal challenges to workers' right to strike on the grounds of balloting irregularities. According to the Labour Research Department, this has been the single most important means by which employers seek to bring an injunction against a union since the first anti-union act was passed in 1983. The complexity of strike laws, and the increasing number of specificities as to procedure, have made it possible for employers to win injunctions on the basis of absurd technicalities. This week's victory for BA in the courts, overturned on appeal, was precisely an example of such - the employers alleged that the union had broken the law by failing to advise members of twelve spoiled ballots. You'll recall that there was a similar case where the RMT were hit with an injunction when a court decided that the union had failed to specify the exact location and details of the workplaces at which workers were based, though the union was using data supplied by the employers. There is only one purpose for such laws, and that is to decisively compromise the democratic right of all workers to withdraw their labour.

Moreover, aside from the letter of the law, there is always a battle over interpretation. Judges are not mere verdict-vending machines. They may be independent of party control, but they are not independent of the class relations in which they are situated. The ideological biases imparted to them by their class status, as heads of a highly conservative legal profession, are hardly of negligible import in their verdicts on such matters, whatever the high-minded abstractions they imagine themselves to be motivated by. The fact that in a number of high profile disputes at the beginning of what is likely to be a period of intensified class conflict the courts have decided to openly interpret the law in such preposterously biased ways suggests that there is an attempt by many in the judiciary to set a precedent that makes it almost impossible to hold a legal ballot. To put it another way, these decisions constitute class conscious acts of repression, facilitated by - but not determined by - existing anti-union legislation.

The underlying issue here is that the democratic right of workers to withhold their labour is one that conflicts with the property-based right of capitalists to invest, and managers to manage. The Thatcherite mantra was to restore the primacy of the latter at the expense of the former. (The Tories have tended to obscure the class basis of such arguments by insisting that they are also upholding the rights of consumers to consume, unimpeded by recalcitrant unions). All members of the cabinet are committed to this orthodoxy, and the prevailing view is that the class power of the employers - with respect to employment law, regulation, taxes, etc. - is still insufficiently buttressed. So, we have progress to look forward to alright - progress to 1832, and the the great zenith of liberal reformism, in which the industrial capitalists were empowered and the workers put in their place.