Brown Inspired by Obama

Gordon Brown is embracing the Obama approach to try to reinvigorate support for Labour.

Yesterday, the Fabians released a book, with a forward written by Gordon Brown, called The Change we Need: What Britain can learn from Obama’s victory.

The book calls on Labour to learn from the embracing and inclusive approach of the Obama campaign to help increase and revitalise its support.

David Lammy MP chaired a debate between former No 10 communications boss Alastair Campbell, US presidential campaigner Ben Brandzel (campaign director at Moveon.org), the book’s editor Will Straw and Catherine Meyer of Time magazine. The panellists praised the way that Obama’s campaign was people-powered and garnered the enthusiasm of millions but questioned how it should be replicated in Britain.

Straw and his co-author Nick Anstead insist: “For every aspect of the American election – grassroots mobilisation, volunteer management, the use of data blogging and even fundraising – they are lessons Labour must absorb.”

The lessons Labour can learn from Obama are the same that the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and other parties can learn. It is a lesson to British politics that re-engagement is sorely needed. Hopefully all the parties will pick up on Obama’s example.

The question remains how these ideas will be replicated in Britain where fundraising is held under closer scrutiny than in America, where there is a general aversion to door-knocking and when we are starting from a point where individuals have little or no faith in their representatives.

Alistair Campbell attacks the media as “bovine” and “supine”:

During the debate Ben Brandzel asked why the Tory’s are so far ahead in the polls. Campbell blamed the media:

Campbell said: “I don’t accept that the Tory brand has been detoxified at all. It is a media thing”.

“So what is the reason for their advantage in the polls then?” asks Brandzel

“What has happened is that [the Conservatives] have successfully presented a communications strategy that, because our media is so bovine and supine, and want to give them a fair shot, it is being taken up in the media as equivalent to the modernisation we undertook in the 1990s. And it is nothing like that.”