Recently, there has been a growing clamour for Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown to step down. This is primarily due to the country's deepening economic woes, as well as rising unemployment and falling house prices.
Moreover, domestic tax and spending policies have left Britain even more exposed, and adversaries of Brown are angry that he never acknowledges Labour's complicity in this financial mess.
At the Labour annual conference in Manchester, which started on Saturday and will go on till tomorrow, Brown has insisted that he understands the consequences of the financial crisis and considers himself to be the only politician with the experience to deal with it.
But so far Labour has not offered an analysis of what has gone wrong or what should happen next. In other words, Brown looks like he is going down and Labour is being brought down with him.
Members of the ruling party are worried, and they are right to do so, as their leader is gradually losing his popularity. And to make matters worse, his flagship achievement as Chancellor of the Exchequer for ten years is being lost in this economic recession.
Of course, potential challengers to Brown are using this conference as an opportunity to publicise their credentials but it seems the country's lack of direction and focus go beyond this conference.
Brown has explicitly offered himself as the man with the right experience to guide Britain through this crisis, billing himself as a serious reformer as opposed to the Conservative leader David Cameron, who is a free market "light-weight".
His major challenge is to restore faith in his party and convince the voters to stick with him during these difficult times.
For their part, Labour party members need to stand by their leader at this critical time. If nothing, it would make their electoral chances a lot better. But before anything, Brown must accept some responsibility before he can move forward.
