I am a retired Sociology Lecturer now living in France. I left the United Kingdom for a variety of reasons but high on the list was the difficulty of living in a country which had been conned into the belief that we had some new kind of government both sympathetic to the market and global capitalism but at the same time genuinely concerned to create a fairer and more just society (the famous 'third way'. My belief is that this is nonsense. New Labour is a far right "Thatcherite" Government pure and simple. One of the major legacies of Thatchers period of office was the growing and obscene gap between rich and poor in Britain, this has not only remained but intensified under New Labour. The recent greedy free for all in the housing market unchecked in any way by New Labour will ensure that the poor of the future will never have the possibilty of owning a home and escaping the profiteering landlord. How about a windfall tax on the value of houses Gordon Brown!! to start building a social stock of houses Gordon Brown! One of the consequences of this manic commitment to 'market forces' will of course mean no houses for public sector workers and a further deterioration of life in the inner cities. A further consequence of the distribution of wealth means that the poor, estimated in Britain as a quarter to a third of the population will either remain a constant or more likely continue to grow. Poverty is the real problem in Britain and only a government committed to eradicating poverty can begin to call itself socialist (a word which Tony Blair hates) or even 'a party of the left'. Nearly all of Britain's social ills poor education, poor health, drug and alchohol abuse, criminality, mental ill health, single parent mothers are all massively correlated with poverty. When the labour party under the decent "John Smith" attacked the Tory record on crime they promised that a future Labour government would be "tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime" what they meant by the "cause of crime" was poverty an idea rapidly ignored by the Blair government. The notion of "being tough on poverty" was replaced by "tough on the poor". In addition 'poverty' was taken out of New Labour's vocabulary and replaced by the less dangerous and vague notion of 'social exclusion'. Of course there is social exclusion in Britain on a massive scale the the key for understanding exclusion is poverty the social exclusion based on gender, ethnicity, disability, etc which of course exists can always be mitigated by rich members of each group. Enough for now I will deal with the supposed improvements brought about in public services by New Labour in my next posting