“New Labour is in the fight of our lives — and it’s the fight for our future.”

To a cheering crowd — one so handpicked that they heckled journalists who later asked difficult questions — Gordon Brown launched the Labour’s 2010 manifesto in a space station, on Monday.

Or so it appeared.

In fact it was the new “acute” wing of a hospital in Birmingham Edgbaston, the traditional ban on parties electioneering in NHS facilities, got around by the fact that the building hadn’t been completed and handed over yet.

“And today I lay before you a radical and realistic plan for Britain that starts with securing the recovery and renews Britain as a fairer, greener and more accountable and more prosperous country.”

Gordon Brown, aka The Broon, was as lively as he’s ever going to get, although the man is so deathly and lugubrious that he tends to give the impression of a load of processed chicken being lumbered out of a freezer.

Indeed, had it just been the PM, the day might have come off as a clear win.

But that was before the Number 10 genius department got its hands on it, and had the event launched by Ellie Gerrard, a ditz of about age 12, who blogs under the name of “The Stilettoed Socialist“.

She gave no good value, sounding like a debating captain introducing the Archbishop of York, and it was only a matter of time before right-wing bloggers Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale dug up a 2008 post in which she announced that Brown had to go, for the sake of the party. Also photos of her drinking champagne in Paris. And mooning the camera.

“Please do not send any more embarrassing photos of Ellie Gerrard,” Fawkes posted mid-afternoon. “We have more than we know what to do with.”

Ah, Labour. It has spent so long in the warren of Downing Street rooms, a hollowed-out suite about the size of the Fuhrerbunker, that it has not the slightest idea what works and what doesn’t.

“This manifesto is not Blairite, it’s Blair Plus,” said “Lord” Peter Mandelson, the man who created an $800 million dome that later had to be given away to an American company, for a token payment.

Can he really believe that Blair is a drawcard in this way? The man appeared a week or so ago at his Sedgefield constituency, and anyone who saw it on the screen — press was barred apart from pool TV — will never forget it.

The man was posed before a red banner, but he was a bright sunlamp orange, the colours combining to make him look bronzed, like a trophy presenting itself. People gaped. Then he started speaking. And they gasped.

“Iz wunnerful ta be ere bakk innis consishuency uh Sejfiel,” he drawled, the global transatlantic no-sound perfected in his endless tour of the rubber chicken circuit. By the time he had re-appeared in the UK, everyone knew he was working for a range of companies, including a Korean oil company working in Iraq.

The man now attracts something approaching disgust and it was widely speculated that he was going to make a couple of appearances so that the Broon wouldn’t be ceaselessly asked about when he’d be appearing.

True, there may well be a few older middle-class people more inclined to vote Labour as long as Mr Tony was there to keep them in line — but I would think they are far outnumbered by Labour voters more likely to stay away at the memory of how even the broadest notion of the Labour ideal had been traduced.

The return of Blair, the politico-bimbo launching a serious document in the empty space station — all these are indicative of a campaign that has no core, that has been designed from the outside in, to tick a series of boxes supplied by the focus groups.

Thus, we now have a Labour campaign that promises a range of huge rolling-out reforms that should have been started on one or two terms ago — 75% higher education/trade training access for all 18-30-year-olds, a Teach First program modelled on the Teach America thing that been around for a decade or more, extension of GP services so you can get an appointment within days of needing one, rather than weeks, push for a global Tobin tax, etc.

Then there’s the new labour behaviour control — parents to sign a “behaviour contract” with their child’s school (no, me neither), an extension of the simultaneously wonderful/sinister Sure Start centres, where poor families can get child-raising help, as long as they commit to Labour’s robotic notions of human development, and so on and so on.

Then there’s the already canvassed magic disappearing deficit, halved to about 6% in four years, through a mild tax rise and “efficiencies” (and a VAT rise, eventually). There’s a few bones thrown to disquiet about immigration, with a promise that all public service front-end personnel will be required to speak comprehensible English (bad news for the West Country where you can’t get a blind bit of sense from anyone from Shropshire to Land’s End, even if they’ve been here since the rise of the Beaker People).

But then there’s the big one — a push for EU expansion to cover the Balkans and Turkey. I wonder if this casually mentioned item will become a big political issue, possibly an outflanking move for the Tories? For leaving aside all cultural questions, the prospect that another 100 million people will suddenly have right of movement (if not employment) across the EU is fantastical.

To say that immigration is the elephant in the tally room is to understate the issue somewhat. Legal EU immigrants, undocumented immigrants through the EU, and undocumented immigrants coming up from Africa … the numbers are now too large for anyone who lives in large cities to ignore, not because of any crime wave — crime has gone down across the UK in the past 10 and especially five years — but because nothing like the infrastructure or services required have been added to what was already ageing housing stock, and under-supplied health and education facilities.

Labour, and the dominant pro-European part of the Tories have simply gritted their teeth, and let the huge population movements — which none really anticipated — occur, once a whole series of Eastern European states were admitted to the EU. At no time has the difficult question of the right of a community to control its border flows, versus the right of free movement been genuinely debated. Instead, the Maastricht rules have simply been enforced, and then the EU Constitution that nailed them down was ratified without referendum as the Lisbon Treaty.

By and large, in England at least — which is 85% of the votes — immigration is all people want to talk about, and much of it comes from people who do not then drift into ridiculous fears of terrorists or similar. The number of official migrants arriving, minus people living, adds up to about a quarter of a million people per year — but most of them pour into a dozen or so districts of London, and half a dozen other cities.

Even if the three million or so new housing units required had been built, and front-line health and transport services expanded to cope with the extra demand, people would still be legitimately concerned about the degree to which areas of London and the northern cities are culturally changing, not in a gradual way, but in an extremely rapid fashion, in a way that leaves many people feeling fundamentally homeless in any deeper cultural sense.

Indeed, there’s no doubt that if the UK did not have an FPP system it would be swinging right, hard, as Hungary has just done, and as the Netherlands will do in June. I doubt that the Conservative Party would be supplanted, as centre-right parties have been in those two countries by the identity right, but the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) would prosper from any proportional system (as it does, ironically, in the EU elections) with dozens of seats.

But the FPP system is so ingrained in people that they don’t even bother to think about the election, the parties, or the possibility of a change in the electoral structure. Indeed the way people say “I don’t vote” or “I don’t do politics” is now said in a defiant, rather than a casual way — a point of resistance to the endless assertions of the importance of participation and voting.

Labour, for all its hundreds of small promises in the manifesto, bits about reviving community, protecting local post-offices and pubs, etc, etc, skirts the genuine issue of community self-determination, for the simple reason that it cannot be raised without the current dual principles of labour — globalisation and protecting working people — right down the middle.

Indeed the really difficult thing you would have to do is point out to people that, were it not for all these sub-minimum wage migrants, everything would cost twice as much — and that many people wouldn’t really like the austere, fish’n’chips-once-a-week-listen-to-the-radiogram-past that they’re so nostalgic for.

So the manifesto — “a future fair for all” “‘a fun fair for all”, I’d vote for that) — is another exercise in the slow bicycle race, in targeted minimal expectations. And tonight the Tories have projected giant images against Battersea power station, ready for their manifesto launch — “an invitation to join the government”.

An invitation to join the government. With a silhouette and a question mark beside a picture of David Cameron.