Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

The urgency of Labour turning things around was made glaringly apparent during the last recent council elections, which saw Conservatives performing robustly and the Liberal Party in the position where it could make a logical case that it occupied second place ahead of the party currently holding national power.

One casualty of the Labour electoral disaster was two term London Mayor Ken Livingstone.  When such impact hits one of Labour's veteran heavyweights in a city with the working class tradition of the world's most international city, SOS signals are sure to immediately follow, and did.

In achieving such a turnaround from the relative positions of the Tories and Labour at the time Blair won his first resounding re-election after coming to power in 1997 with a ringing mandate, it was necessary for the Conservatives to make sea tide changes that re-positioned them from the stodgy Thatcher-Major image to that embodying the era of the fifties.

The fifties were a halcyon period for the Conservatives when centrists such as Anthony Eden and Harold MacMillan successfully appealed to the nation's vital center for votes.

When parties lose favor with the people the broom approach is used and sweeps occur that ironically result in the dispatching of candidates who opposed the very policies concerning which those same parties are being penalized.

A case in point is Ken Livingstone, a longstanding opponent of the Iraq War who suffered nonetheless for being a member of the same party headed by Tony Blair, and hence was voted out of office after two terms as London's mayor.

Standing in the forefront of Labour's electoral headache was the sleazy deviousness of the Blairites and the Downing Street Memo.  

Even though rebelling party members were responsible for Blair turning in the power reins before he was ready to do so, the public outcry coupled with the new image of a resurgent Conservative Party resulted in a sizable voting shift in the recent British election.

In order for the Conservatives to stage a comeback it was necessary for the stodgy image to be shed in favor of a relaxed, shirt sleeves, voter friendly approach that was shrewdly engineered by David Cameron.  

Cameron's astute fence mending with the British electorate began shortly after he assumed Tory leadership, when he was pictured on the BBC News riding the tubes (subway trains) and shaking hands with his fellow citizens, looming as a man of the people.

Labour is a party bearing populist roots with a strong union tradition.  While Britain has changed from a society encompassing large numbers of laborers and mine workers, to re-establish favor with voters Labour needs to appeal to the grassroots instincts of workers in a high tech era.

The party needs to provide the same kind of populist touch that resulted in the elections of prime ministers such as Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson.

The party needs to provide the same kind of populist touch that resulted in the elections of prime ministers such as Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson.

In order for Gordon Brown and his party to achieve success in the next election as well as beyond it, another important point must also be addressed.  

The Labour Party needs to free itself from any appearances of a Tony Blair influence.  

The British people in the last election repudiated Blair and his pro-George Bush, deceptive Iraq War policies as exemplified by the infamous Downing Street Memo.

In the manner of a room spray, the influence of Blair must be "sprayed away" by Labour and its operatives if it expects to compete with the new image Tories and revitalized Liberals.