Whether it’s competition or coronation this summer, expect to hear a lot about ‘Labour values’ before (and after) Andy Burnham becomes prime minister. Labour can’t stop telling us about their wonderful values. ‘When we rally around Labour values together, our movement changes the lives of those who need it most,’ Keir Starmer intoned like an adenoidal android during the local election campaign.

What exactly are ‘Labour values’? Late-era Starmer could get quite emotional – as far as he was able to – about them, stating, ‘We’re on the side of communities across our country,’ whatever that means. In his resignation statement, he told us how he’d been ‘building a country where everyone is seen, everyone is valued’. Whatever they are, Labour values always come wrapped in this sickly sermonic goo, suggesting some kind of higher moral calling.

This nebulous cant – trumpeted from that section of the moral high ground occupied by the ignorers of mass child rape, to take just one oversight – is enough to knock you sick. We are constantly told that disagreeing with Labour is not ‘who we are’, that ‘Britain is better than this’. It is done in the tone of a disappointed form tutor reprimanding 13-year-olds for sticking chewing gum on the backs of bus seats.

Empathy and kindness are the wrapper on Labour’s good old-fashioned envy and malice

Under Andy Burnham, this is only likely to get more spew-inducing. At his victory rally, he boasted that his campaign was led by ‘strong northern power women’, adding, ‘I wouldn’t mess with them and I suggest that you don’t either.’ Well done, girls! As ever, there’s a line of ladies near the front of Labour, but not one right at the front. The time, somehow, is never quite right.

The word ‘progressive’ – all over both Wes Streeting’s resignation letter and his toe-curling statement of fealty to Burnham – seems to function as a magic talisman of Labour values. Progressing from what and to what? We are never told. It seems to be a Labour synonym for ‘nice’, but without any frame it can mean anything. Cancer is often progressive, after all. Amusingly, some Labour figures have started saying that we should hold Labour governments close to our hearts because they are precious, special things that don’t come around too often – yes, like plagues and world wars.

Starmer and company seemed to think that Labour values were enough, that no thought or even preparation for government was needed. Labour values were the magic pixie dust to be sprinkled about No. 10, and everything would just sort itself out. Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo. In fact, just saying ‘Labour values’ was enough. Like the Muppet Babies, with their promise that ‘We make our dreams come true, we’ll do the same for you,’ the offer is bafflingly vague. How, and with what?

Burnham has been rumbling about ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘trickle-down economics’, even suggesting that there’s too much Thatcherism about – which, considering the size of Britain’s benefits bill and debt interest repayments, is a bold claim.

But Labour values often seem to require pretending that it’s even further back in time. Labour likes to talk as if it’s 1926, because that was the last time they had a point. Riding in to dispossess fat cats and the gentry today is like turning up to fight the Boer war a hundred years late and waggling your breech-loading rifle in the utterly bemused faces of Madonna and George Michael.

If we knew what Labour values are, rather than what Labour say they are, we could perhaps begin to make sense of some of their more inexplicable wheezes: paying to give away the Chagos islands, or encouraging growth through whacking up taxes by £40 billion.

Good news, though! I’ve untangled the knot, and I feel it is my duty to share the solution with you. You will be confused no longer. Everything will suddenly snap into place.

With the Labour party of today, their entire purpose is for them, high-status people, to spite and goad you and me, low-status people. This isn’t snobbery as we knew it in the last century, as anybody can join in – and similarly, members of the low-status out-group can be rich, poor or middling, so long as they don’t share those ‘Labour values’.

Nothing and nobody else matters. This is the Labour through-line, what gets them out of bed in the morning. Every other consideration has been boiled away, leaving only the camaraderie of getting up the noses of their out-group. It explains everything they say and do – from Hermer’s prosecuting of special forces to the pointless VAT raid on private schools to digital ID. If it winds up either ‘toffs’ or ‘gammons’, or better still both, then it must be the right thing to do.

Empathy and kindness are the wrapper on Labour’s good old-fashioned envy and malice. They are nice, you are nasty. They might as well operate a Dame Edna-style badging system, pinning stars on people marked ‘GOOD’ and ‘EVIL’.

What about the actual, very grave, problems facing the country (which I could list here if I had another 40,000 words)? Forget it.

It’s horrible to have to face the true state of things and very tempting to say ‘don’t be silly, they aren’t so bad’. But this won’t do. It is especially galling when Labour accuses others of trying to start fires of ‘division’, when it is they more than anybody who have been, for decades, merrily sloshing petrol about with one hand and flicking a lighter with the other.

We don’t really have the luxury of not despising Labour any longer, of being urbane and unflappable in the face of their destructive power. I’m afraid there should be division – but not between races or classes. The divide should be between Labour (indeed, between progressives as a whole) and the rest of us. We may flinch at such thoughts, but our squeamishness is no longer useful.

Andy Burnham? More of the same. His first statement after Starmer’s resignation was all about tone, firing out words like ‘serious’, ‘orderly’, ‘responsible’, ‘stable’ … He then immediately convened a massive selfie packed with grinning goons, chuffed to be lifted by his mighty wind. Because he’s Labour, you see, with Labour values, through and through. And the Labour party rules through moral entitlement. This means that the correction of their basic errors never happens.

The values the country desperately needs – honesty, intelligence, competence – never even occur to them. After all, who needs those when you’re the good guys?