Dubbed by some the “Black Tony Blair” or “Britain’s Barack Obama”, British Labour MP David Lammy is set to deliver an election mode rallying call and perhaps a warning about the consequences of losing power to Progressive Labour Party supporters tonight.Mr. Lammy was somewhat guarded about the specifics of his keynote address this evening at the PLP’s Annual Conference Banquet. But he hinted that he would be giving his perspectives on current global challenges which “are principally around the recessionary economics but also, I think, with particular concern about parts of our young people and crime”.Mr Lammy represents Tottenham, the first city to be hit by riots in England this summer. He said he also wanted to speak to the PLP on what it would mean to lose power. “And to share my reflections on why the Labour Party lost power, and lost touch with people such that they chose to vote for David Cameron.”Asked why Labour lost the 2010 election, he said: “I think we lost because we became administrators and bureaucrats. We didn’t sound like a party of ideology and ideas. The party of 1997 embraced the free market and by the time we were kicked out of power in 2010, there are now some real challenges to how you civilise capitalism and tame some of the harsher aspects of the free market.”He noted Labour’s history as a “progressive liberal party” but “some of the challenges we face in 2011 don’t seem to be about freedom. The answer to some of my constituents who have just looted a shop or burned down a store is not more freedom”.“The Labour Party in Britain has to reconnect with its roots, which is work, hence ‘Labour’. It is a party of character and work and, actually, that is a conservative notion small ‘c’ conservative, not a big C.”He said Labour’s focus in Britain had been on its liberal instincts, but the party now needed to “rediscover its ethical instincts”. “I’m a Christian Socialist, actually. And our tradition in the party is one that does assert self help, reliance, work and an ethic. And I suspect that its those traditions in the party modernised, obviously for the 21st century that will see us come back into power and reconnect with the people.”Asked how a Labour party can effectively represent working class interests when its leaders are decidedly not working class, Mr. Lammy argued that many people identify as middle class. “When we talk about the working class the biggest problem with the working class is that a large segment of the working class ain’t working. It’s the workless poor. And that’s what the riots demonstrated. Politicians struggle to connect with the workless poor. And those who are working are the working poor,” he said.“The Labour Party can’t be a party of just one segment of the country or it will never be elected. But it does have to demonstrate that it has the ability to articulate the challenges presented by the working poor and the workless poor” or become irrelevant.“I represent a politician from a poor background raised by a single mother. There ain’t many of me around in the forefront of politics,” he said. The fact that he was no longer working class did not mean that he could not relate to the working class experience.Asked what he thought were the costs to society of a labour party losing power, he said: “The costs are immense. What we’re seeing now in Britain are deep, deep cuts, made over a very short period. We’re seeing a lost generation of young people who are growing up jobless, lacking hope. University fees now soaring, cuts to further education. I am deeply worried that the divided Britain that I came of age in we’re returning to.”Mr. Lammy finds it “problematic” that Britain’s Cabinet includes 18 millionaires. “This is not because I have some sort of predilection against money, but I do want to see a coalition of people who can relate to the country. I’m not clear at all that David Cameron and his colleagues can easily relate to large sections of the country. I think bad decisions are made when you don’t see women in his Cabinet in this administration in the way that you would expect. And you certainly don’t see ethnic minorities present in the way that we need to. What that leads to is a divided country. It leads to decisions that cause tremendous hardship.“And in the same way we saw George Bush make decisions, indeed, drive America into deep recession because of the trillion dollar debt that he maintained and the tax cuts he insisted upon, we recognise how great it would have been if the Democrats had won again after Bill Clinton and we experienced tremendous pain as a consequence of having George Bush in place.”The “right wing journey,” he maintained is the easier one. “It’s the journey that sees a country as a corporation, not a group of people. So we have to dig deeper, we have to try harder, we have to be more persuasive, more tenacious, we must never be complacent,” he said. And we have always to be democrats, always diversifying, always getting new roots in, never tribal. And if we are tribal, we lose power.”