Across the pond

Gordon Brown is the Nero of the twenty-first century. As Prime Minister he has been limiting his ministers to two minutes of his time. While seeking to keep in power by developing his own website.

I discovered this, when I voyaged to Birmingham last weekend for the first UK WordCamp, which was a conference organised by UK users of WordPress, which is the computer program I use for my blog.

Once there I discovered that Brown was relying on WordPress to reverse the dreadful verdict of the opinion polls and the by-elections. This is the sneak preview of the Gordon Brown website.

Poor Gordon has been overtaken by events. So his website connecting him to the electorate is unlikely ever to get under way. His own foreign secretary has diverted the headlines, by saying, what most Labour Party members have been saying for months, Gordon Brown has lost the plot.

But Miliband, who equals in his callow youthfulness, both David Cameron of the Conservatives and Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats, is even more fervant in his embrace of WordPress and the internet age.

He pioneered his own blog as Foreign Secrectary. He has yet to learn that it is no substitue for talking to the electorate.

If he does that, he may win the hearts of Labour supporters, because the policies he is arguing for, are in line with Labour thinking.

Unlike Blair and Brown who have sold out to American consumer capitalism. Which is not the only way of running the world. As Barack Obama knows, but may not say too often, because he is not yet President.

Gordon Brown wants to start his blog to get votes. He does not realise that he lost the support of Labour voters, not because of his famed difficulty in dealing with human beings, but because his policies have have been much too kind to the privildged classes.

David Miliband realises this and has put forward an agenda which any Labour voter could adhere to. This is the crux of it.

Every member of the Labour party carries with them a simple guiding mission on the membership card: to put power, wealth and opportunity in the hands of the many, not the few.

That is what Labour voter vote for. And that is what Milband needs to embrace if he wants to lead the Labour Party.

Many of these Labour voters do not have computers.

He needs to talk to them.