Chapter 4 of The Labour Party Rule Book 2008 deals with elections of national officers of the party. Part B clause 2 B ii deals with nominations for leader and deputy leader as follows: “Where there is no vacancy, nominations shall be sought each year prior to the annual session of party conference. In this case any nomination must be supported by 20% of the Commons members of the PLP. Nominations not attaining this threshold shall be null and void.”

On Tuesday afternoon I walked from parliament down Victoria Street to the Labour party headquarters and handed in a letter for the general secretary, Ray Collins. It asked him what action he was taking to comply with this rule and to ensure that nominations should be sought for the position of leader of the Labour party.

It is just one week now till the opening of the 2008 party conference in Manchester. I still have not received a reply, far less a nomination paper.

The public has stopped listening to Gordon Brown. He is not a popular prime minister, but he would continue to have my support if he showed sound judgment, international leadership and political vision. Instead we have vacillation, loss of international credibility and timorous political manoeuvres that the public cannot understand.

This summer our leader should have been exposing the ridiculous position of the Conservatives who said they want to “share the proceeds of growth” just when there is none! The prime minister should have been attacking David Cameron’s vacuous attempts to catch new Labour’s coat-tails when the global economic downturn demands a new and different response.

But the prime minister’s failure to attack Cameron is less serious than his failure to attack the winter poverty that looms for many vulnerable pensioners who have seen their fuel bills increase by more than 25%. Like the prime minister I believe in the importance of a stable regulatory and fiscal framework for industry. Like the prime minister I would not impose a windfall tax on energy companies simply because they have prospered. No, the point of a windfall tax is that you impose it upon a windfall – luck, not efficiency – and a windfall is exactly what the government ended up giving those companies in carbon emissions credits, to the consumer’s detriment.

Of course energy companies would have pointed to the slim profits on their retail business, to which a prime minister should have responded by exposing their internal pricing mechanism and the 20% increase in dividends they have paid out to their shareholders. The judgment called for here was moral as well as political.

International leadership, particularly on climate change and the environment, has been lost. A year ago, the UK led the world on these issues, no longer. The prime minister’s international credibility has been squandered. Who in Downing Street advised him not to turn up at the signing of the Lisbon treaty? Britain needs a prime minister that is respected, admired and influential on the world stage.

Above all, where is the vision? What has happened to the big picture that the prime minister wanted to set before the nation only a year ago? Was this it – the temporary reduction of stamp duty on properties up to £175,000? Was this it – a raising of the threshold for inheritance tax? Has politics really become so small?

Three great issues face the world today: global warming, global terrorism and raising a third of the global population out of abject poverty. Cameron’s Tories cannot address these issues because at the core of their values they do not understand the connection between them. That connection is “justice” and it has always been the foundation stone and inspiration of the Labour party. We understand that solving global warming is about justice between the generations as well as about justice between nations, so that none consumes more than its fair share of the world’s carbon and other environmental resources. We understand the links between injustice, poverty and violent extremism: not so as to excuse terrorism but so as to tackle it more effectively. We understand that children around the globe will continue to starve and die from easily prevented diseases unless there is justice in world trade.

The tragedy for those of us who nominated the prime minister is that since achieving power he appears to have forgotten what it was he once wanted to do with it.

In the cabinet there are many other politicians who clearly possess the sound judgment and vision that our country needs. Any of them would be an infinitely better leader for our country than David Cameron. I hold no particular brief or mandate for any one of them. But I want the choice. The Labour movement needs that choice: not for itself but for the sake of those that we seek to serve. In accordance with chapter 4 of the party rules the nomination forms must be sent out now.

Barry Gardiner MP is Gordon Brown’s special envoy on forestry and a former minister

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