Returning to the UK this week from covering the American conventions, I was struck above all by one thing concerning the UK’s governing Labour administration’s political mood: the party’s sheer pessimism, its fatalism, its defeatism, its sense that no matter what anyone does the game is up and nothing can be done to change it.

This sense of failure is not confined to the way Labour politicians think about Britain. It seems to infect the way many think about the rest of the world. Intellectual pessimism has long been one of the distinguishing features of British conservatism. Now it is part of the progressive mindset too. For Labour the whole world is framed by its own present sense of failure. It is as though, if they are doomed to defeat themselves, then they are going to make damn sure everyone else is doomed.

Attitudes in the UK to the American election are the most striking example of this reflexive pessimism. I have found myself in Labour and even Liberal Democrat circles several times this week, and they all say exactly the same: Obama has blown it. Sarah Palin has turned the election. McCain is going to win. Hillary would have been better.

To each bit of that I say, phooey. This election isn’t settled yet. There is an eight-week battle ahead and anything can happen. Certainly McCain could win. Two weeks ago I set out five reasons – the eclipse of George Bush, Republican campaign skills, uncertain times, Obama fatigue, and race – why he might. But there are at least five real, potent, living reasons why Obama can pull this one out: time for a change, the Republican record, fear of McCain-Palin, improved Democratic campaigning, and solid promises for working-class voters (not counting the inspirational candidate, getting beyond the Clintons, and more.)

Those assets have not all disappeared at the first whiff of political grapeshot. The changing demographics that are slowly but remorselessly pushing America towards the Democrats have not gone into reverse just because Palin appeared from nowhere at the end of August. The deep, consistent opinion poll finding that Americans think their country is heading in the wrong direction hasn’t suddenly done an about-turn. Obama still speaks for new political forces, and the registration of new pro-Obama voters has not dissolved into a political black hole. American women have not turned overnight into tribal airheads who will mindlessly vote for anyone in a skirt.

But nor has America in 2008 been wholly transformed from the nation that elected Bush in 2000 and 2004. Whatever the matter was with America in Thomas Frank’s bestselling 2004 book on conservative populism is still pretty much the matter four years later. If America in 2004 was, in the resonant title of John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge’s outstanding book of that year, the “right nation” – right because it is morally driven and also because it is rightwing – then it has not undergone an identity transplant in the brief period since. Unless and until you understand that white men in America simply tend to vote more conservative than men in other industrialised countries, you just don’t get much about America.British progressive politicians are fascinated by American politics, but not many of them get this, or much else about it either. America’s foreignness – on which the BBC’s Justin Webb has just penned a book of his own – consistently escapes them. Too often they jet in wanting to see only similarities, and to focus on the things about America that reinforce their instincts about Britain. They seem only to see the form of politics – the campaign, the soundbites, the presentational issues, the ways of doing things – not the content, the causes and the conflicts that make American politics so distinct and different from British politics, this election in particular.

Tony Blair and his successor as British premier, Gordon Brown, took the embrace of America a stage further. As soon as they encountered it in 1992, they identified overwhelmingly with Bill Clinton’s moderate, centrist Democratic cause because it seemed to confirm and illuminate their view of how the British Labour Party should behave – moving to the middle ground, triangulating the difficult issues in the party battle, modernising the campaigning. Blair believed that Clinton’s victories were essential preconditions of his own. If the Democrats won, Labour could present themselves as a party on the side of history. Brown’s instinct is similar.

Yet the Labour high command, past and present, is privately conflicted about Obama. They want a Democrat to win in November, but they do not really want it to be Obama. Labour resents Hillary Clinton’s defeat this year almost as much as the Clintons do. They looked at Clinton and saw someone they recognised. They thought, somewhat naively, that she was the safe and therefore the better choice. That is why there is a kind of schadenfreude in Labour circles about the way the campaign has gone in the past two weeks. It is as though Labour people almost want the Democrats to lose this year, because in some twisted way that outcome would validate their own failure. At one level a lot of them feel very threatened by Obama and his success.

This is because Britain’s Labour politicians have become prisoners of themselves. The late Labour politician Roy Jenkins’s analogy of Blair’s attitude to electoral success – as that of a man carrying an irreplaceable Ming vase across a polished and slippery museum floor – still goes straight to the point. Both Blair and Brown (Brown in particular) have always been haunted by the fear that their success could suddenly go irreversibly wrong. It is why they are such frightened control freaks. They worry that Britain is, at heart, a Tory-voting nation that must be appeased not challenged. And so, having feared the backlash so much, they have now helped to make it happen and seem powerless to do anything about it.

But these are mind-forged manacles. They were needed in their time but that time is no longer now. This is as true in the very different political arena of the United States as it is in the UK. In the end, in spite of the risks, the great thing about Obama is that he is the post-Clinton candidate that the Democrats need. He offers a different political temper for different political times. He embodies hope and change and still, perhaps, victory. Brown, in the UK offers none of these. Obama’s lesson is staring Labour in the face – but Labour seems simply too demoralised now to learn it.

—Dawn/Guardian News Service