The British people, I was told, were far too apathetic, far too disengaged, far too convinced that their voice – no matter how loud – would fall on the deaf ears of politicians who couldn’t be bothered

This is true. However, what is even more true is that the British people want politicians and everyone else to sort out society but they don’t want to have to go to the effort of pressuring the politicians to do so. It’s not that we don’t want change: we just can’t be bothered to make it happen, and so are legendarily satisfied even with substandard situations. Must’nt grumble. Things go badly, we blame politicians, we then carry on with life instead of working to make things change, nothing changes, things get worse, then we blame the politicians again, and thus continues a cycle that is the answer to the question: What does it mean to be British?

The difference is, in the US the corrupt party in power was the right-wing one, so getting people to gather round the nominally ‘progressive’ one in the name of ‘change’ worked.
Over here we have a corrupt, incompetent, morally bankrupt government run by the nominally ‘left-wing’ party, and in a two-party state caused by FPTP that means voters can only really get ‘change’ by moving to the right.
We *had* a ‘British Obama’ ten years ago – his name was Tony Blair…

So if you want to find the next Obama movement, don’t wait for the next Obama – start the next movement.

Never a truer word said.

Bush has failed , Obama has not succeeded. Obama has won an election , he has no proven leadership experience. Hopefully he will succeed.

Agree with Andrew, we had our Obama moment in 97 when a corrupt and incompetant right wing government which had fought a war on Iraq was replaced by a youthful, energetic, left-leaning government – and the Left were so fucking complacent about it we didn’t look to carefully what they were really up to.

I hope the Americans are more careful.

and the Left were so fucking complacent about it we didn’t look to carefully what they were really up to.

That’s true. But then one could argue that there isn’t really a proper leftwing structure. There’s no infrastructure here in the UK, a void that was previously filled by the trade unions, that can hold these people to account. Obama has people like Glen Greenwald and a whole bunch of people on the centre-left that keep holding his feet to fire. These people have built up audiences, alliances and capacity. We need to do the same.

* We will be following this on Next Left. have a new microsite ‘The Change We Need’ dedicated to the pamphlet and hosting debate about lessons from Obama and movement politics. The editors’ conclusion can now be read there, and the full chapters from David Lammy and Ben Brandzel are being published this weekend, ahead of the publication date on Monday, when we will be reporting and liveblogging the launch with Alastair Campbell, Ben Brandzel and others. And that will have the facility for discussions on the individual chapters, etc which might be useful for those who want to get into the wonky details of voter engagement, the blogs, etc and engage with the editors about that.
http://www.changeweneed.org.uk/

* We have a twitter hashtag for the project – #cwn – and there is a feed on the Change We Need site and at the twitter link below.

http://www.changeweneed.org.uk/twitter/

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23cwn

* I am grateful for Liberal Conspiracy’s engagement with this. Very much looking forward to the debates which we hope the pamphlet will generate. It looks set to spark quite a lot of discussion inside the Labour Party (already there are some concerns being expressed that it is promoting too much change – which I think is largely a hangover of New Labour, when this really is something different – and it will be important to interrogate that). But I particularly think that liberal conspiracy should be an important space for this debate, in a non-party and cross-party space. I think there are lessons for all of the parties, and that for this to work for Labour itself, we will need to engage in (rather different) debates inside the party and in progressive movements outside it, and look at where connections can be developed (including where there are disagreements).

The Democratic Party , would , of course , be wonderfully right wing by UK standards so this is all complete tosh and tosh imagined by the very people who spend their lives trying to reduce the land of the free to the land of the enslaved they inflict on us . Furthermore it is the constituency that supported the Soviet Union unilateral disarmament (still does ) and tries its best to get us in the Europe corner of the playground .
Obama may be a weak President abroad , the truth is cannot afford to be a strong one , he may indulge a line of tedious septic bullshit but I am yet to be convinced he has anything in common with the collectivist anti democratic anti individualist European left. I say this because increasing numbers of right wing commentators are alarmed at both the prospect that he may actually be the moon -bat the Guardian portrayed him as . God help us all if he is but fortunately n Americans are less used to being bossed around than we have become , and he will be quickly isolated .
Open Primaries in safe seats are the way to reinvigorate democracy here. We live in a country where the overwhelming majority want immigration controlled , marriage supported ,the end of “Multi culturalism , a long spoon for supping with Europe and the final defeat of the baby boomer Liberal disaster covering useless schools , politicised policing , justice sidelined abortion used as contraception , soviet style crèches et al . On rotting post war edifices like the NHS ,welfare for life I may disagree with part of the broad right ,but if a candidate had to stand up in front of real people we would see the end of the “Progressive agenda “. That is why you want to replace democracy with PR and let the elite deal in darkness.

You want democracy to breathe then let people have their say make your case .Stop hiding in a dead carcass riddled with corrupting presumption based ultimately on class .

…and what of those who aren’t averse to grabbing some Obama glory, even reminding us of how some half-witted hacks may have compared them to Obama? They muddy the waters, diverting people down blind alleys, and who see the grass-roots as something to be avoided if possible, and communities as vital only in a pork-barrelling sense, something to give a veneer of helping the little people, but mainly either for appearance’s sake (Photo!) or for narrowly divisive (i.e.unlike Obama) identity politics reasons.

It seems apparent to me that Obama, Dubya, Tony B, et al, share the common characteristic of expending so much energy getting to the summit, and staying there that there is very little left over to actually understand many of the issues.

If they claim that they do (understand the issues) then, in my view, this exemplifies their limitless capacity for self deception.

I have worked in health for nearly 20 years yet would still only claim a glimmer of insight into how a machine like the NHS actually works.
Parenthood is equally mystifying despite my best efforts – yet these guys want to run a country and raise a family at the same time ………… insane, absolutely insane.

I don’t know enough to comment about Obama’s personality but I suspect characters like Blair are terribly narcissitic, and maybe even psychopathic.
Thatch was another damaged politician – look at her deranged children.

In my book anybody who pursues such a lifestyle is inherently suspect.

don’t wait for the next Obama – start the next movement.

Tell me, how much of a movement would there have been without a guy like Obama at the top of it?

The reason Labour and their Fabian cronies are so keen on trying to have a mass progressive movement to prop up a clearly anti-progressive government WITHOUT an inspiring figurehead is because Labour has not produced any inspiring figureheads since Blair. None of the current nor next generation of Cabinet ministers, or even any of the young Labour meatheads (who hope we will ignore the fact that they used to disagree with most Labour government policy and yet STILL joined Labour because they felt their own chances of getting elected were more important than principles) have even the remotest hint of being inspirational figures, even on the level of Blair let alone Obama.

A movement needs a leader. Simple as.

And those who point out the problem of trying to build a movement still in government, namely that movements succeed when they are trying to replace governments, are right. If Labourites want to change Britain so much, they can start by lobbying the government to change its policies, ffs. Instead of all this BS about grassroots and community organising, which they will never get.

One key difference between the two political systems is that whipping doesn’t operate the same way in Congress. A Senator or Representative can defy the whip on issues and survive in a way that an MP can’t. This is because they have built up a political base of their own through the primary system. Further, even in what they call a “General Election” a third of the Senators and perhaps even more State Governors are not up for election.

Here an MP can find a seat first and build up a local base afterwards. Take the case of dear old Nick Palmer, who fought a hopeless seat (Chelsea) in ’83, and then got on with his career (as an ex-pat) until the mid ’90s when he applied for Gedling. How he got on the shortlist I don’t know, but I suspect there was a lot of resentment against the prominent local councillors interested in the nomination and he was chosen more because no one disliked him than because he inspired anyone.

I have nothing whatever against the man himself but the shortcomings of the process are obvious.

As one who more or less agrees with Simon Jenkins that a Cameron government will be popular for a fortnight, there clearly is a political space opening up. To follow his thinking a little further, that space will be both on the right (where populist campaigners will be darlinged by the mainstream media) and on the left. Yet I cannot for the life of me see how Ben intends to transplant American political culture here, or whether we should even want to do so.

I think the problem isn’t that we lack an Obama, it’s that we’ve had one already – the left, reinvigorated by populist enthusiasm for a charismatic centre-left leader and a desire for change – things, if we recall, could only get ‘better’. We’re actually ahead of the Americans, we’re already in our ‘post-obama’ world, we’ve been through the backlash, the disillusionment, the regret and the shame. We voted to go ‘forward, not back’ and we voted for a ‘New Britain’ when we should have been asking, “forward to what?” and “What will this New Britain look like?”

We didn’t ask. We bought an sealed box with the words, “a change you can believe in” written on it. When we opened it, we discovered it had a Facehugger from the Alien films inside.

We got exactly what we were promised and it turns out it stinks, that we were stupid for not asking more questions, that we were naive for believing that ‘things could only get better’

Now we’re all slightly crazed and desperate when we realise that charisma is good for one thing: The charismatic individual’s power. We realise that ‘change’ is a meaningless, empty term picked because it’s vague, because we can all project our own version of ‘change’ onto the charismatic leader.

And we realise that there are limits to what Governments can do and consequences that come from empowering a Government to do “whatever it takes, just whatever works” to fix problems. We’ve discovered there’s a price to pay in terms of jobs, economic growth and prosperity on very high levels of taxation and regulation, that access to cheap and easy credit is no compensation for the loss of our own money in our own pockets (understatement of the century) and that there’s no controls to protect civil liberties against rampant populism. Crucially we’ve learned that you cannot just take money from one group of people, throw it at another and expect that to work.

So what on earth would a mass movement of Britons rally around now? “We want what we’ve got but slightly better please?” Forget it! No chance… that’s been the Lib Dems strategy for decades for the fat lot of good it does them.

Until you’ve got a Government that doesn’t try to fix every known problem in the universe, attempting to build a mass movement around the idea that “Government should solve this problem!” is a complete waste of time and effort for everyone involved. The people are sick of hearing it, they don’t believe you and they just want you to f**k off.

Your best bet is a charismatic leader that can persuade everyone that, no matter what our experience in the past, they have the power to make these stupid ideas work where others have failed because they’ve got nicer teeth, nicer hair, a sexy voice and an attractive smile. It’s dumb but it appears to work, every time, without fail. This does not make me happy.

What Charlotte said, pretty much. No-one’s going to get excited about Labour, no matter what is done. We won’t get fooled (by this lot) again.

(We here being the British public – I was never fooled in the first place, but even so I didn’t think they could be *this* bad…)

I’ve reviewed Ben’s contribution to the recent Fabian pamphlet here: I’ve reviewed the pamphlet here. http://blog.matthewcain.co.uk/the-change-we-need-revie/

I thought there were lots of good things in it and it’s a really important contribution but the conclusions of the Fabians were weak because they failed to compare properly the similarities and differences