By KUNA,
London : Labour must learn from Barack Obama’s campaign to become US president if the party is to “rediscover, renew and refresh” itself, a British minister has said.
David Lammy MP, a friend of Obama, said next week’s election could see “something very special”.
He praised the campaign for its high level of “grassroots” support.
Addressing a meeting in Westminster, central London, late on Tuesday, Lammy warned that if Labour did not reconnect with voters in a similar way, the right-wing British National Party (BNP) could gain seats at next year’s European elections.
The higher education minister said the party had sometimes failed to address white working-class people directly enough.
This, he argued, could result in disenchantment which, combined with the economic downturn, would see the far right prosper in next June’s European elections.
Lammy said that, as a minister, he was not allowed to publicly say whether he would prefer Obama, for the Democrats, or John McCain, for the Republicans, to win the US presidency.
But he added “It’s my sincere hope that next week in America we will see the culmination of something very special”.
“We need desperately in the Labour Party to rediscover, renew and refresh our sense that we are a movement”.
“If we are to be the force that I want us to be and to be in power more than 24 years in the 21st Century, unlike the 20th, then we need that kind of grassroots organization”, he continued.
“The really interesting thing that the Obama campaign has succeeded in doing is it’s brought people together in really a genuine coalition of interests”, he told he gathering.
Lammy said the European elections would be “more challenging” than the London Assembly contest earlier this year, in which the BNP succeeded in having a member elected.
“We have to fight it and fight it hard and fight it with organised, active campaigning. Otherwise, the BNP could become an established force within the European Parliament”, the MP concluded.