As a spectator I could advise two strategies to stage a comeback. The first would be to utilise the unity of his party. The defeaning silence of the Labour party during Brown’s poll slump contrasts highly to Cameron’s party pulling him apart over the summer when he himself slumped in polls. Brown has an option of turning the tables on issues such as Europe and watching as the Conservatives self implode.

The second strategy is challenging Cameron on issues and force him to make commitments rather than criticising such as beaurocracy and “social responsibilty”. Which jobs and regulations would Cameron cut? Isn’t social responsibility just an excuse for government to do nothing i.e Hooverism? Brown must make somekind of argument against what he is proposing and where he can make some concessions on beaurocracy.

It looks pretty bleak right now but it did when Tony Blair left and Gordon Brown took over. What matters is that Gordon Brown reminds people why they voted for Labour in the last 3 elections and crucially gets back on message. Tony Blair was very good at reminding floating voters of what Labour stood for, something that Gordon Brown has not.
He needs to share his vision with the country which includes more than out of hours at GP’s clinics, 56 day detention and a constitution for the NHS. How will he deal with global warming? How will he deal with child poverty? How will he move past government hand outs to make the public services more efficient?

Good luck Gordon

I expect that that is where triangulation eventually takes us. No difference of substance, only differences of personality.

I’d have thought that Sunder Katwala made the best case possible for trying to open out a genuine ‘difference’. Unfortunately, Brown is a believer in sitting squat on the middle ground, which leads to inane stuff like extending detention, ’cause it plays right, rather than having intrinsic merit. Or ID cards. Etc, etc.

Politicians are now defined by, perhaps their competence, but certainly not their vision. If Brown has a vision, now would be a good time to share it.

Cameron’s PR tactics (don’t know about his policies) are based around saying “We’re not that different to them, just new and fresh. Don’t be afraid, you can vote for us, we’re not bumbling like this old and staid government.”

Whilst I would assess it likely that a Tory government will concentrate on doing further damage to the ability of the British economy to compete in the modern knowledge economy, as the opposition they have the advantage of being fuzzier about their intentions.

As such, the long years of centre-right attitudes from Blair and Brown mean there is little to distinguish between the elements of Cameron’s policies that he chooses to highlight and various parts of the NuLab record. Hence, there is no differentiation and nowhere for Labour to go at the next election.

Labour set out to govern from the centre-right and has done so: the Tories may yet slash and burn public services from the NHS to the BBC, but who’s to say that a fourth-term Labour government wouldn’t do so as well?

In these circumstances the question isn’t about fantasies of a “powerful progressive manifesto” (no party having served three terms in office can plausibly repudiate its record in that way) but whether there is any point to Labour at all.

In 1983, Labour lost 120 parliamentary seats - it’s on course to lose more than that next time. Its “next generation” have no new ideas, let alone any idea about how and where to build an anti-Tory consensus. Not the least of the problems is that what little effective action a national government can take against global warming (and the possibility that the Gulf Stream may switch off, giving us a Siberian climate - or, rather, those of us not made homeless by flooding) will be massively electorally unpopular. Not the least of the problems is that the British economy is based on speculation not production - whether in house prices or City shenanigans. Not the least of the problems is the ageing electorate, older people being more receptive to the (rightist) narrative of fear rather than the (leftist) narrative of hope.

The Labour Party was created as a means to an end. One crucial part of that end, the moral and practical validity of collective action, whether you call it solidarity, fraternity or just plain civic consciousness, has frayed beyond repair since the 1970s. This government has cared not a whit for it - Blair and Brown have no doubt that public services are better contracted out to businessmen who may or may not be rascals than to not-for-profit co-operatives, for example. You can sweet-talk them into signing cheques a lot more easily than you can pass motions to divert co-op surpluses into a political party’s coffers.

Neither Labour nor the Tories deserve to win the next election - but someone’s got to, and Cameron can probably hardly believe his luck. Indeed, if he’s got any sense, he won’t produce a manifesto of the traditional type, just a list of (more or less woolly) philosophical bullet-points and a promise to govern in accordance with them, and he’ll still come out of it with 350+ MPs. And then Labour’s inquest will display the grisly expanse of its intellectual and moral exhaustion for all to see.