THERE is only one thing worse than suffering electoral meltdown and that is emerging from a disaster with no idea how to overcome it.

It is simply useless to repeat the bland twaddle parroted by John Major's Tory ministers in the mid 1990s that "we're not getting our message across."

Voters are having no difficulty in understanding the Brown government's message or in responding to it and they don't like it. They won't vote for it and, unless it changes, cataclysmic defeat awaits Labour at the general election.

Gordon Brown claims to be a listening and learning Prime Minister, but his actions give a contrary message, despite his belated recognition that doubling the 10p tax rate for five million low-income people has been a political disaster.

But this isn't the only policy decision to have shocked or disgusted Labour's natural supporters.

There are a whole raft of policies that have been chalked up in recent years at Labour Party conference, with decisions carried against the platform and dismissed with cavalier abandon by the party leader, whether Tony Blair or Gordon Brown.

When Mr Brown took over the reins of power from his new Labour twin, his spin doctors whispered that, unlike Mr Blair, the incoming leader was Labour through and through and he promised a new start.

But neither the propaganda offensive nor the nods and winks of his team have delivered real change.

In fact, he has continued his predecessor's approach of treating the labour movement as the enemy, fighting tooth and nail to appoint his personal candidate, City fund manager David Pitt-Watson, as general secretary rather than Unite union official Mike Griffiths - a decision that is even the more remarkable since Mr Pitt-Watson has left the job without starting it.

Mr Brown's apparent positive response to the conference decision in support of the fourth option for council housing has been illusory.

It's the usual half-baked dog's dinner of housing associations and part-own, part-rent rather than a programme of council-built, council-owned properties to tackle the acute shortage of affordable housing.

The PM has uttered warm words about the need to help agency and temporary workers, but he is the man who authorised his minister to filibuster proposed legislation.

He refuses to win easy popularity by taking the railways back into public ownership, even though, in light of the tens of billions of pounds handed over to greedy and reckless banks, no-one will take seriously his claim that renationalisation cannot be afforded.

Mr Brown has failed to draw up an industrial policy, being utterly attached to a free-market, easy come, easy go attitude to inward investment that has seen manufacturing jobs haemorrhage out of the economy.

And he rides roughshod over widespread complaints about his privatisation programme that hands public assets over to privateers while demeaning and short-changing public-service workers.

Unless the labour movement forces a change of political direction or, failing that, of leadership, there will be no fourth Labour term.

There will be a return for a Tory Party that is already planning further restrictions on strikes in public services. The time for polite advice is over. The labour movement has to act.