Blast from the past

And, sure enough, up pops Peter Mandelson, urging Gordon Brown to re-emphasise the new Labour values that, he claims, won Mr Blair three terms in office.

Remarkably, Mr Mandelson claims that those values included fiscal discipline, investment and reform in public services, helping the poor and maintaining strong partnerships with Europe and the US.

Mr Mandelson clearly has a highly selective memory if he thinks that investment in public services was demonstrated by instigating a continuing purge of nearly 100,000 public-sector jobs.

Or that helping the poor was best accomplished by presiding over the widening of the gap between rich and poor to a level not seen for over 40 years.

And, as for fiscal discipline, that is surely not a strength demonstrated by a government which spent over £5 billion in taxpayers' money prosecuting an illegal war, £50 billion in bailing out the failed speculators of Northern Rock and even more than that in helping the big banks to weather the sub-prime crisis which they brought upon themselves by their own incompetence and greed.

Couple that with the recent revelation that the government's "marketisation" of the Post Office has resulted in no benefits to the service and huge damage to the structure of the postal industry.

And add to that the evaluation of the Commons public accounts committee that savings which the Cabinet Office says will come from the semi-privatised corporate services that it is foisting on government departments is based on no more than a pack of "flimsy estimates."

Pile on top of that the seemingly endless stream of cash which the government is passing to privateers via its so-called NHS "reforms," and fiscal discipline is shown as merely an empty phrase.

Of course, strong partnerships with Europe and the US have certainly been maintained.

However, given that the partnership with the US has been expressed by the monstrous Iraq war and the intervention in Afghanistan, while the partnership with Europe has resulted in the continuing and growing restrictions on working people's rights, there's not a lot to brag about there.

But, as with most new Labour icons, Mr Mandelson has never been one to allow the facts to get in the way of a good argument.

Labour's policymakers should remember that Mr Mandelson's emergence from the woodwork may be simply due to the fact that his lucrative term of office as Britain's EU commissioner is drawing to a close and he is going to be in need of a job soon.

The poisonous new Labourism that he espouses will not and cannot produce the revival in Labour fortunes that they are seeking.

It is those ideas and their implementation that have left the party in the mess that it is now in.

Only a huge effort to relink Labour with its grass roots and the adoption of the values that the trade unions and other progressive organisations have been fighting for will hold out any prospect of success for Labour, certainly not more of the same old rubbish that the now discredited new Labour project has saddled the party and the movement with for so long.