Conspicuous by his absence in the running order at next week’s TUC in Brighton is, Yes, you’ve guessed it, Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the man who will don his dinner jacket and go running to address City bankers at the drop of a fiver.

And it’s hardly surprising, given that he has been instrumental in betraying everything that the labour movement stands for ever since he took office.

His government’s decision to rule out cash handouts for households struggling with soaring fuel bills was rightly blasted by the trade unions on Friday as a “downright disgrace.”

And his abject surrender to the power companies over their obscene profiteering demonstrates why this newspaper has no time for a man whose treachery has long outweighed any good that he has ever done.

Mr Brown’s wittering on about “no short-term giveaways and gimmicks” does nothing to obscure the fact that he hasn’t had the bottle to take the power firms to task over their highway robbery of working people and has, instead, reneged on his government’s commitment to ease the burden of the increasing number of people who find themselves struggling in fuel poverty.

Talk about energy efficiency, “reducing bills not just temporarily, but permanently,” does nothing to disguise his rubber-stamping of the utilities’ distribution of vastly increased profits to shareholders at the expense of the consumers. And any such savings would be quickly absorbed as the companies continued to jack up prices without restraint.

The outrageous cheek of counterposing the need to make the country more fuel-efficient against the urgent necessity of controlling the privateers in their continued plundering of the nation has infuriated the trade unions and explains why Mr Brown has done a runner rather than face his critics in Brighton.

But face them he must at some time or another, since, without bringing the unions on board, his government doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of re-election.

But what on earth could he tell them?

That he doesn’t want to renationalise the utilities because it would offend his mates in the City and his colleagues in Brussels?

That the market mechanism is the best way of controlling prices, when it is clearly failing to do so?

That it is right that pensioners and the low paid should underwrite massively increased bonuses to shareholders while they are dying of cold or cutting their food budgets in order to do so?

Clearly, none of the answers above would serve.

And, equally clearly, Mr Brown has abandoned any hope of winning the next election for Labour.

It is unpleasantly obvious that new Labour has no answers, no principles and no intention of doing what is right for working people.

New Labour has nailed its colours to the mast of privateering, profiteering and blatant, unbridled capitalism.

It is no longer a question of merely challenging Mr Brown’s leadership of the Labour Party.

Brutally, Labour must remember its roots and honour its generations-long commitment to working people or it will disappear into the vaults of history as yet another failed project and will be replaced by an organisation of the working class which will honour its historic mission to defend and advance the interests of the poor, the oppressed and the exploited in a way that new Labour has no intention of doing.