Can the British Labour Party help Democrats in the United States find their way back to power? In a week when Prime Minister Tony Blair was humbled by the voters on the way to a re-election victory, that may be an odd question.

But even a damaged Blair and his party offer lessons that analysts on both sides of the Atlantic say could aid the Democrats as they look towards elections in 2006 and 2008.

Blair has been left weakened by Thursday's election, rebuked by voters for his alliance with US President George W. Bush as America's staunchest ally in the Iraq war.

His future as prime minister may be limited and his party faces turbulence. Still, Labour's three consecutive general election victories constitute a record the party had never achieved and one the Democrats have not realised since the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Politicians and the press in Britain are focused on what went wrong for Blair. For Democrats, the significance of the election may lie as much in the ability of Labour to win an election at a time when its leader was so personally unpopular.

The reason is because Labour for now remains the dominant pole in British politics, thanks over the years to Blair's personal talents and the party's success in redefining the landscape.

Once dominated by the left, Labour under Blair won a landslide in 1997 by moving to the middle. In power, Labour has governed with a mix of liberal and conservative policies and an eye on so-called middle England.

Today, the Labour party occupies a huge amount of space along the political spectrum, so much so that the opposition parties have been forced farther to the fringes.

"They've done an amazing job of being successfully centrist,'' said Anthony King, a professor of government at Essex University and election night analyst for the BBC.

The parallels between Labour and the American Democrats are imperfect. Blair's party won another parliamentary majority on Thursday with just 36 per cent of the vote. Britain's multi-party politics create dynamics that are different from the forces in the United States.

The domestic debate begins with acceptance of a governmental role far beyond what it is in the United States. And what works for a party in power is not always the formula for a party seeking power.

Still, for more than a decade, Labour and the Democrats have been something of a shared enterprise, trading on one another's successes, learning from each other's failures. After Thursday, there is something of both for the Democrats to absorb.

The most important may still be Labour's success in sucking up the oxygen of its opponents. In power, Labour has effectively frustrated the once-mighty Conservative party's efforts to regroup after its 1997 loss.

Labour may now be blessed with weak opposition, as one voter told Blair during a TV studio town meeting. But Blair has kept the Tories at bay by never surrendering the issues where Labour or the Democrats in the United States have natural advantages.

Priority

Under the guidance of Gordon Brown, Britain's finance minister and likely prime minister when Blair steps down, Labour has made the economy its No 1 priority, supporting growth policies that have provided stability and prosperity.

On health, education and welfare, Labour has mixed more spending with reforms designed to improve the delivery of services.

Much remains on that project, but the mix has been broadly acceptable to a majority of the country. "No one really argued that there was no improvement in public services or the economy,'' said David Miliband, a former domestic policy adviser to Blair who was named to a cabinet position in the new government.

"People could say they wanted more, but they recognised that there was improvement.''

Labour also has played aggressively on the opposition's turf. Blair and Labour blunted the Tories' attempt to tap into anti-immigration sentiment with policies designed to protect Britain's borders while making the case that immigration is good for the country.

Blair has never forgotten to talk about crime and while Labour's policies on crime, homeland security and antisocial behaviour have angered civil libertarians, they have prevented the Conservatives from gaining traction.

"Blair has left the right with no openings," said Bruce Reed, president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council in Washington.

The irony for Democrats is that Blair and Brown found the formula for their success by studying the 1992 "New Democrat'' campaign that carried Bill Clinton to the presidency.

But British analysts see the Democrats as having drifted since the former president left office in 2001, and some Blair advisers believe Clinton's legacy has been squandered.

Blairism, as it is called here in London, may not be the perfect model for the Democrats. It may no longer even be the perfect model for the Labour party, given dissatisfaction here with some of Blair's efforts at triangulation between the old Labour party and the Conservatives.

The public distrusted Blair on more than the war. Labour's spin-doctoring was seen as government by insincerity and took its toll.

Few strategists believe a simple return to Clinton's centrist New Democrat formulation of the 1990s by itself will get the Democrats out of the doldrums.

The world today is different and the politics of the country have shifted. But the records of Blair and Clinton suggest an opposition party must recognise its weaknesses and do something about them and know its strengths and never abandon them.

In 2000, Democrats surrendered their advantage on the economy when Al Gore decided not to make the economic record of the Clinton administration the central theme of his campaign for president.

Democratic strategists believe that Bush's economic record, particularly on fiscal matters, provides an opening to make the Democrats once again the party of stability, growth and fiscal discipline. But party leaders have yet to do so.

The resurgence of the liberal wing of the party in 2004, born of anger at Bush over Iraq and other issues, has led some Democratic leaders to conclude that the route back may be through an energised, progressive, grass-roots army.

A number of strategists rightly see this as one of the party's great strengths.

Partial answer

But the US and British elections suggest that is only a partial answer. Labour won this week with a divided base; the Conservatives lost with a united base, just as the Democrats lost last autumn with their base united.

"Democrats can take a lesson from [the campaign run by Conservative leader Michael] Howard not to isolate yourself and not just motivate your base,'' said Mark Penn, a Democratic pollster who was an adviser to Blair during the campaign here.

Where Blair, Brown and Labour cannot help the Democrats is on the social issues or the intersection of religion and politics. There is nothing comparable in British politics.

Howard tried to make abortion an issue at one point but quickly abandoned it under pressure from all parts of the spectrum.

When Blair proposed using the words "God Bless'' in a speech before the Iraq war, his advisers hooted him down, according to Peter Stothard's book Thirty Days. Democrats will have to find their own way in these areas.

The same may be true for national security, a debate that continues to rage among Democrats. It is not clear what lesson Democrats can or should draw from Blair, given the firestorm over Iraq here.

One Democratic strategist, after watching what Blair went through, said he believes that those who suggested the Democrats would have been better off in 2004 by being unreservedly in favour of the war are plain