·        In May we had the disappointment of local elections, not least in London, where we lost Ken Livingstone, one of the most charismatic and successful politicians of his generation.

·        Shortly after that, we had Crewe and Nantwich, where we suffered our first loss to the Tories in a by-election for over 20 years. Then last week, Henley.

So it has been a difficult year with some real disappointments.

But then also, just a few short weeks ago, on the other side of the world, someone who consider not just a friend and but a man of real integrity won the Democratic nomination to become the next president of the United States.

After an enthralling contest with Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama finally made it past that magic figure of 2118 delegates.

And he will now go on to face an opponent in John McCain – who people also rightly admire for not just his remarkable life story but also for a remarkable campaign over the last year.

And as someone who spent some time living in America, first at studying law at Harvard and then as a practicing lawyer, that gives me real heart.

I think the Obama-McCain contest means that we have the chance to see the best of America in this election year.

And during these last few months, as I spent time in Chicago and Wisconsin in February during parliamentary recess and then on the doorstep in Crewe and across Greater London in April and May, I have spent a lot of time thinking about what, if anything connects these events. What do they have in common? What direction do they point us in for the future?

Now the temptation, of course, is for the skeptics to argue that there are no lessons.

They might ask: what Crewe and Camden have in common with one another, let alone with Kentucky and Kansas. Can we really compare a local election and a by-election, let alone a Presidential campaign that has lasted a year already?

Others might say that the characters involved are too unique for any real lessons to be learned.

Understandably they might ask: how many people are there like either McCain or Obama?

Who has McCain’s life story? An American war hero, tortured by his captors, who refused co-operate or consider bargaining for early release.

In a different way, people will ask who can compare with Obama’s oratory? The lesson that we need more inspiring politicians doesn’t seem to take us very far.

So there will be the skeptics.

And there will also be others who draw the wrong conclusions, I think.

Again understandably, much has been made of the symbolism of the Democratic contest:

·        the young black man versus the woman who had waited and worked for this for years

·        race equality versus gender equality

·        a choice between two different ways of making history, rather than a battle of ideas.

And there are, of course, elements of truth in all of this. These candidates are in many ways unique. The success of an African American is unique – and I hope will inspire a new generation of young people to reconsider politics in both the US and here in Britain.

In policy terms, Obama and Clinton agree on more than they disagree.

But I think there are deeper lessons to be learnt.

After all, few people would have predicted that McCain, let alone Obama would win the nominations of their parties.

When Obama began his campaign, he didn’t have:

·        Hilary’s name recognition

·        her networks in the party and the media

·        her access to big financial donors

·        her experience

·        or the track record that she and Bill had developed over 25 years in frontline politics.

Yet he still won.

And for his part, this time a year ago John McCain was running out of momentum and money.

He didn’t have Mitt Romney’s fundraising, Mike Huckabee’s populism, or Rudy Giuliani’s status as the front runner.

And yet against the odds he is now the nominee.

This means something – and I think it means something not just for American politics but for Britain too.

My view is that we are seeing a new way of doing politics in America that has the seeds of some real changes in Britain too.

I draw three big lessons.

The first is an issue about who does politics.

Putting their unique personal stories aside, the significant thing about both McCain and Obama is that they both came from outside the political establishment.

They are both represent a reaction to the political language and methods that have come to dominate politics since the 1990s.

John McCain has styled himself against the Washington elite. His political career has been founded on maintaining an outsider’s perspective on Washington and the way it relates to people – whether that is campaign reform or his famous town-hall meetings.

In a similar, way Obama makes a virtue of his recent arrival on the national stage – something people once regarded as a weakness.

In many ways he has run against Washington at the same time as running for it.

While Clinton’s candidacy was based on her ability to understand the rules of the political game, Obama has promised to change them – in the way he raised money, the way he campaigned, the way he brought new people into the political process.

And there is something about these two outsider candidates that connects with people, whether that is with rural communities in Iowa, casino workers in Nevada or students in Wisconsin.

Now switch to Crewe and the issue of who does politics also comes to the fore. This time in the shape of the ‘Tory toff’ stunt, which began as a practical joke and mutated into a campaign theme.

And the reality, I think, is that the Crewe campaigners picked up on something: people do feel that politicians are out of touch with their everyday lives.

As with the US, people do feel that Westminster is made up of a small elite, that spends more time talking to itself than the rest of the country – and in a coded and managerial language that only it understands.

But the real problem with the Toff campaign was that it picked the wrong target.

Because the issue is the political class, not the upper class.

Parliament's greatest strength has always been its ability to draw upon the rich tapestry of people's own lives and experiences, spanning every social class but also very different personal experiences.

The Labour party, which emerged from the union movement, brought manual workers and tradesmen to Westminster to speak for people’s everyday concerns and struggles. And those advocates help build a consensus around a welfare state.

Teachers, social workers and miners joined them in parliament, speaking to the values of public service.

And on both sides of the House, debate has always benefited from the doctors, lawyers and businessmen and women.

The danger, in a world where Westminster has created its own industry of think-tanks, lobbying firms, PR agencies and media outlets, is that we lose the rich diversity to a generation of politicians who have emerged not from the professions, the business community or the unions but from within Westminster itself.

It’s dangerous because people struggle to find the connections with this political class that seems to operate in a different world.

And the result is that people begin to channel their efforts into other spheres of politics where they feel they will be listened to.

At best this is single issue campaigns – climate change, poverty action groups, human rights.

At worst people drift away from the managerial mainstream to the extremist fringes of politics.

This is where people are offered simple answers to the problems they see around them – whether it is the BNP or extremists using religion as a way presenting the world in terms of black and white – good and evil.

And a distant political class is dangerous for a second reason. If parliament becomes filled with an elite that hasn’t seen and experienced the lives that people lead across Britain, then it will suffer from the blind spots that comes with.

Any organisation that is too homogeneous makes poor decisions: because it has a narrow field of experience, knowledge and perspectives to draw upon.

That’s why we have multi-disciplinary teams in all walks of life: from the NHS to NASA. It’s why businesses look to bring in people who think differently and draw on different ideas.

And the same applies to our politics. We need people who have different experience to bring to bear on problems.

Over the last few years, there have been more attempts to draw on the views of people outside the Westminster bubble, including new forms of public consultation. But the real breakthrough will come when Westminster itself looks, feels and works differently as well.

So the first lesson that I draw from America, but also from the events of this year, is that we need to find ways to break open politics beyond the usual suspects.

I think we have been far too cautious in finding new ways to lower the barriers to involvement in politics itself. That needs to change:

·              So we should be starting early, involving young people in politics not through talking shops that can seem patronizing, but through ideas like young mayors who have real budgets to spend in local areas, as they have done in Lewisham.

·              We should be closing the gap between the public and our Party by experimenting with open primaries, so carrying a Labour membership card in your wallet isn’t the be all and end of all of whether you can take part.

·              And as the party’s finances recover, we should be doing everything we can to make sure that the financial costs of running for parliament aren’t a form of selection by the back door, whether that means bursary schemes, loans or other mechanisms.

·              We should give back the power to political parties so that they can take positive action to make parliament more representative of the ethnic diversity of modern Britain.

·              We should be creating more opportunities for political talents to emerge, which do not depend on the patronage of a few people at the top of a party. In the US it is striking that this is the first election for nearly 50 years in which both nominees are sitting Senators. That gives you an idea of the pluralism and different routes to office in American politics, with Governors, Senators and Congress men and women. That’s one of the reasons I’d like to see more local areas elect their own mayors, creating new ways for people to make a difference and make their name.

·              And we need new ways for ordinary people to make their voice heard in Westminster. Five years ago around a million people marched in London against the war in Iraq. And whatever people’s views about the war itself, we need to recognise that people need somewhere to channel their views and concerns. So more direct democracy and new forms of accountability all need to be part of the mix.

People will disagree with some of these specific ideas, but the point is a bigger one than any particular recommendation.

Whatever the policy mechanisms we use, politics – and especially progressive politics – cannot assume people’s trust.

It has to earn it, through becoming as open, as inclusive and representative of the wider public as it can.

And if that is first lesson emerging from the US, I think the second is a question of political strategy.

Because the lesson of the last year is that the political messages and methods of the 1990s are beginning to look very tired and out of date.

What is striking about both of the nominees in the US is their refusal to be bound by artificial ideas about how to determine their policies.

o       McCain champions immigration reform, despite his party’s hostility to it. He pushes the Republicans on climate change, despite the skepticism on the American Right about the existence of climate change at all, let alone our ability to stop it.

o       For the Democrats, Obama says he is prepared to open up a dialogue with Iran something that many candidates would not be prepared to say, even if they believed it to be the right idea in theory.

Now in most presidential elections, it would be very unlikely to have one candidate taking what look like big risks, yet here we have two candidates doing just that.

And the truth is that the public is gravitating towards two candidates who show less interest than the others in the politics of calculation. Of course that still goes on – and probably always will do – but something important is happening.

Here we have two nominees who define their politics against the challenges they face – climate change, mass migration, a war-torn Middle East – not the old adages about ‘tough on national security’ Democrats or ‘no go areas’ for Republicans.

Two politicians who are opening up debate around important issues, not closing it down.

Yet over the last decade both New Labour and the New Democrats got into the habit of defining themselves through what they were against rather than what they were for:

Not the Old Left, not the New Right, but New Labour was the formula.

Some of that was political pragmatism, and some of it was a genuine search for new ideas after the lows of the 1980s.

But the use of triangulation, of defining yourself against your own party, of a managerial language which drains the values from policy also became a habit – a reflex –which alienated people in the party 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.

If anyone doubts this, they need only to have witnessed pensioners traveling to polling stations with freedom passes in London in May this year, only to vote against the party and the mayor that created them.

That only happens when we fail to explain to people that free travel is founded on the idea of decent treatment for older people in society, who have made their contribution and deserve better.

So in 2008 we need to be much clearer about the kind of society that we want to create.

The narrative of the last ten years – a strong economy and strong public services – needs another ingredient: a good society:

It means:

·        A planet that is livable for our children and their children

·        Housing conditions that you would expect to see in the fifth richest country in the world

·        A flourishing public realm with quality public spaces for people to enjoy

·        Stronger social bonds in communities – between different generations, between different cultures

·        Better quality of life for adults with busy working lives and more help for parents having children for the first time

·        A safer, more fulfilling childhood for children who face greater commercial pressures than ever

·        More structure and new opportunities for young people wondering what the future holds for them in life and in work

These are issues which go to the heart of inequality, but which will never be addressed by a new round of public service reform or even changes to tax credits.

They are about the places where the social, the personal and the political all meet.

And the truth is also this: they are issues that only a Labour government can address.

A new breed of Tories now speaks the language of society and of social responsibility– in ways that we should have been doing.

But the reality is that Thatcherism has imprisoned the Right:

• leaving it incapable of questioning the market
• unable to get past its hostility to the state
• and convinced that we must choose between a flourishing society or an active state.

Our opportunity is put the collectivism that is in the DNA of our party centre stage.

To say that a good society comes from decent treatment of others, from collective decision-making.

Because collectivism means we can do politics differently:

·        whether that is putting social considerations above those of the market, from carbon emissions to flexible working,

·        or whether it is expanding the frontiers of the welfare state into more help for parents, more spaces to play for children and the right to an apprenticeship for young people

The point is that we can do these things when we come together as a society.

So the second lesson I from the US can be put very simply:

Labour is now a century old.

New Labour is 20 years old.

The question is what comes next. The answer to that lies in starting with a vision of society, not the spectre of the 1980s and the caution that comes with.

And the answer also lies in a different form of public conversation.

One in which people feel comfortable raising issues which have no easy answers. Which can’t be solved by a three point plan that will be rolled out by next week.

That is painfully absent from our political landscape, in a world of 24 hour news and the temptation for a new initiative to be announced each week. But it’s something we need more than ever.

And if we need new people doing politics, and new ways of creating policy, then we also need to learn a third lesson from the US: we need to reinvent the way we create political movements.

Look at the race in the US and of course there are the soaring speeches and the slick adverts. But there is much more here than meets the eye.

The way the race has been funded has re-written the rulebook.

Every four years, the world watches the candidates court the big financial donors in their parties; it watches deals with powerful interest groups.

This turns politics on its head. Rather than feeling shut out, people feel they have a stake in the campaign.

So the fundraising has been different. But that is just the beginning.

Because the Obama campaign has committed resources into grassroots organisations, spurring countless young people to take part for the first time.

It has put together a web strategy premised on connecting activists and supporters to one another, not just pushing out tightly controlled messages from campaign HQ.

Suddenly in the US the web is being used to connect people with politics again – at a time when people are using it to circumvent politics in the UK.

And the huge lesson for us is that the technology is neither particularly complicated, nor especially expensive or labour-intensive to run.

Obama’s web strategy is focused solely on making the vital work which goes on in town halls and on doorsteps work better.

The lesson is that internet campaigning should also be about giving supporters the tools they need to get their own message across in their neighbourhood or local area.

His website, for example, has functions which allow grassroots supporters to set up phone-banks in their own home.

And the site’s social networking space, ‘MyBarackObama’, allows supporters to express exactly what an Obama Presidency might mean to them, or their town, or Church.

The gap between this and poll-tested lines is enormous: one has real authenticity, the other does not.

The point is that both the Democrats and the Republicans in the US are getting the basic principles of campaigning, and creating a political movement, right.

To borrow a phrase from the Move-On campaign: a political movement should have low floors and high ceilings.

So on the one hand, the Obama campaign has actually lowered the barriers to entry into politics.

Just last weekend, his ‘Unite for Change’ movement urged supporters to log onto his website, type in their zip code and find an event near them. There were over 3000 gatherings nationwide – and not a single one was sanctioned or signed off. Instead they were spontaneously organised and posted on the website by local supporters.

These meetings actually echo very closely the front-room politics that we know so well in the Labour Party: ECs, GCs, branch fundraisers and raffles and so on. But their emphasis is overwhelmingly on linking seasoned old campaigners and activists to those coming into politics for the first time – and it’s working.

Likewise, his Organizing Fellows are a team of bright young people being trained in political campaigning and community organising, giving a political voice to networks (like Churches, youth groups and so on) which already exist within communities – and echoing Obama’s own route into politics.

So while the format feels similar, in practice, it is a far cry from our political parties’ reliance on membership and rigid structures.

On other hand, Obama’s team has consistently raised the expectations of what can be achieved when people are willing to take part.

• Not just donating $10, but finding 10 others to do the same.
• Not just campaigning, but encouraging friends and family to take ownership of a campaign too.

When I was in the States I was able to witness some of the results of this participation.

It was the girl serving coffee in a Starbucks in Chicago, who had never been remotely interested in politics until she looked at Obama’s website, found others in her neighbourhood talking and getting excited about different issues. She came into the team’s headquarters and met the Mayor for the first time – and by the time we were there, was a ‘Precinct Captain’, raising money for the campaign and involving other young people in the debate.

What is intriguing is whether this momentum can be sustained by either McCain or Obama if they find themselves in government in a year’s time.

When the Republicans came into office in 1994 they managed to sustain that sense of being a campaigning, underdog, insurgent movement even when they were in power. They didn’t let incumbency burden them.

And some of the activism that we are seeing in the US, like the voter registration drive, the raising money for Iowa flood victims, the Obama Organizing Fellows, has that same feel, the same sense of momentum. A feeling of permanent activism.

Yet that it is something we have failed to do on anything like the same level. Too often, the instinct has been to managerialise things through layers of bureaucracy.

Offering people the promise of a tiny voice in a bureaucratic process of policy formulation, instead of a real part in an ongoing campaign for practical change.

So there are big lessons for us.

In particular, our challenge is with a generation of people, particularly those in their 20s who are socially minded but disconnected from our movement.

As the Fabian Society’s excellent pamphlet Facing Out recently made very clear, there is a great deal of untapped progressive energy out there:

• only 9% of Labour sympathizers in NGOs are willing to join the party

Yet:

• 59% would be willing to support a Labour campaign on a national issue
• 51% a campaign against a particular Conservative policy
• and some 61% were willing to support a Labour campaign within a local community.  

These are people who want progressive change, but are disaffected from a political process that feels stale and old-fashioned – and that has to change.

Over the eight years that I have now been in parliament, I have often thought how alien it feels to the life my mother led as someone who came over to this country in the 1960s

How alien it feels compared with inner city Tottenham, where I grew up, or the suburbs of Peterborough where I went to school.

And to so many people Westminster can still feel and an odd and sometimes distant place – the language, the formality, the style, the way ideas are formulated can seem at odds with people’s concerns and the way they feel about life.

Yet if there is one great challenge of our age it is for politics to be a place where people come together to make collective decisions just as we become more different from one another as individuals in society.

That lies behind improving our quality of life, ending child-poverty in this country, leaving the planet in a proper state for our children and their children.

For me, the great uncertainty is not about policy: it is whether our politics is up to the challenge.

So I’d like to leave you with one last thought, on a much more positive note.

Paradoxical as it may sound, I take heart from that fact that the next election may yet be a way off.

Large sections of the commentariat write up the next election as a fait-accompli – like it’s already happened.

But I completely reject that.

We need to start to see the next year, two years as a gift.

A gift because it gives us the time to begin a fightback, making both the culture of our party and our policymaking more responsive, sensitive and inclusive.

I am looking forward to working closely with the Fabians and Young Fabians, and putting together some ideas about how this will work in practice.

Because this is no small task for an incumbent government, but instead of looking wistfully across the Atlantic at a Presidential election, we need to start rebuilding our own progressive coalition from the bottom up.

It took two nominees in the US just a year to build that kind of momentum.

If we can do the same here, then there really is all to play for.

Thank you very much.