blogger interrupted

As many of you know, I spent a lot of time working with the Labour Party in the UK.  I learned a lot there, and they’ve learned a lot here.  Looks like they’re getting ready to learn again.

From Barack.

Brown’s reluctance to make political capital out of the Obama visit has frustrated some Labour activists who hoped the visit would prompt a debate inside the party about lessons to be learned from Obama’s success in creating a mass movement of activists.

As one cabinet member admitted: “It is telling that whilst Obama is trying to tear down the traditional walls of the Democratic convention, and open it up to ordinary Americans, Labour’s 200 most senior activists will be meeting in private this weekend to decide Labour’s policy platform.”

I must say, though, having been to a few Labour conferences, the Labour process of writing a platform is far more democratic than in the US, and is, in fact, the most grassroots policy development process I’ve observed in my time abroad, or in the US.  It’s interesting that Labour sees it the other way around, at least this year.

More stuff.

The issue has been taken up most strongly by David Lammy, the young black MP for Tottenham and a friend of Obama from black alumni dinners at Harvard University. Lammy has been increasingly blunt about the inability of the British political class to draw in new faces or use new methods such as open primaries. In a recent Fabian lecture, he said: “I think it’s wrong to describe New Labour as a movement. I don’t think that it could be described as a movement that filtered down to ordinary people on the ground.”

Lammy, and other party thinkers such as Sunder Katwala, the Fabian general secretary, argue: “Obama is showing the political messages and methods of the 1990s now look very tired and out of date.” Lammy warns that managerial language has alienated people and left the public disorientated. “For many people, the good things that we are doing sound more like a list of bullet points, rather than a mission to change society. So they switch off, or worse, become alienated from a party that looks like it has become part of the establishment.”

The methods of the 1990’s died with Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign.  There’s a lot to write about that, which I will certainly revisit, but I’ve done some writing on that already.

And then there’s this.  Looks like Barack has opened a lot of eyes in the UK.

Katwala claims Obama, by contrast, has led a revolution in political mobilisation. Above all, he claims Obama has set out an inspirational vision of a good, and equal society, using a language of hope Labour seems to have forgotten in the daily blizzard of micro-initiatives.

Hope is contagious.

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