LONDON -- The mission of the Conservative Party is to help the most vulnerable in society. To do this, it will not cut income tax but will make improving Britain's public services its main job.

What is the Conservative Party coming to? Who is going to fight for the owners of capital, the exploiters of labor, the privateers of the free market? And who will now pursue the mission of using physical force against all foreigners, aliens and the wayward offspring of the undeserving poor? Apparently, no longer the Conservatives, at least in the words of the speechwriters for a Conservative spring conference in Yorkshire during the last weekend of March.

This rebranding of conservatism after its years in the doldrums following the expulsion of its old queen, former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, might seem a desperate attempt to position itself on the Labour Party's weakest flank: its claim to be the only party that can and wants to radically improve the lot of the vulnerable, the dispossessed, the excluded.

It's certainly an attempt to position itself somewhere. In the long evolutions of social democracy and capitalism, there is no longer space for an overtly procapitalist class party. Thatcher spun her entire political career, and that of her party, on attacking socialism and the welfare state. That task is done. The new leader, Ian Duncan Smith (the third since Thatcher was forced out of office) does not have that option. Like U.S. President George W. Bush's father, he is forced into promising a "kinder, gentler" form of "rightwingery."

It is impossible, though, to imagine what policies would preserve British conservatism as a distinct party of property while making the welfare of the most vulnerable its prime mission. The rebranding (though it lacks a new name) has been greeted with almost universal disdain, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Charles Kennedy, condemning it as offensive because it is exploitive and fuels growing cynicism about politicians.

Options true to the heart of Conservative tradition are simply not on. Thatcher signaled her arrival as a populist leader in the late 1970s with refined remarks about the fear of being "swamped" by colored immigrants. No one can do that now, however much they might think it.

Rightwing populism depends on vaunting the "little man" who struggles not only against a horde of invading aliens and a monstrous expropriating state but also against big business with its unmerited profits, seizure of the markets and undue influence in the corridors of power.

Going with the flow in global capitalism means allying with very big businesses. The movers and shakers in today's capitalist politics are not small shopkeepers or family enterprises, and certainly not rural smallholders. They are dealing with capital flows that are larger than the gross domestic product of many small impoverished countries. Yet no political party in a 21st-century liberal democracy can set itself up as the primary political representative of these controllers of capital flow.

Where does politics go when the true class goes out of politics? Virtually all NATO countries (and France) had political systems that depended on class conflict. Now, almost none do -- not because class has ceased to exist as a social and economic force but because it no longer has any overt political expression. The very thing that brought democratic governance into being -- the stridency of class politics -- has itself effectively been destroyed by democracy.

The need to win the assent, however passive and feeble, of a majority of the people to a party government and the role of the mass media in transforming mundane aspects of governance into hyperdramatized crises and ignoring more complicated matters that can't be so dramatized have emptied politics in the NATO countries of authentic conflict.

So Britain's Tories, having lost their role as defenders of property, of capital, of big business, of monarch and empire, are left scrabbling around in the detritus of democratic concerns for their mission. Which means that they too, like Prime Minister Tony Blair's New Labour -- and like most modern parties -- will stand accused of nothing but spin and image, or using political words for mock battles and spurious attacks that leave much of the populace dispirited and disgusted.

Just about the only clear-cut issue to have galvanized anyone in New Labour recently has been the threat by Bush and allies to take military action against Iraq. Even the most devoted Blair supporter finds it hard to back the idea of bombing Iraq in the name of defeating worldwide terrorism. In Britain, in particular, with its long history of trying to defeat terrorists/guerrillas/freedom fighters in Northern Ireland, not to mention in Kenya, Malaya, Zimbabwe by military action, the idea of bombing terrorists out of existence wherever the CIA declares them to be, is deeply unpersuasive.

This revival of spirit in the Labour Party has less to do with the revival of old class politics than with fresh discomfort at being allied with a superpower -- at being cast as one of the big, bad boys who swagger round the world biffing any one cheeky or smoking in the bike shed.

Of course, the problem is that national party governments, such as Tony Blair's, are having to rewrite the rules of engagement in the post-Cold War world. It was easier during the Cold War because working-class interests could be identified with those of the Soviet bloc, while the ruling class found their cheerleader in the United States. Today, no organization of the left, or working class, identifies with al-Qaeda, although many may identify with the dispossessed Palestinians, Israel cannot easily be cast as the U.S. in a Mediterranean mask.

In other words, Labour members are uncomfortable with power, especially military power, unless it is exercised in the name of the working class. When it appears to be exercised against the weak, such as Iraq, its old passions are reawakened. Unlike the American left, which has been silenced by Sept. 11, the British left has not yet been recruited for a war against terrorism.