Paralysis on the home front as Blair beats the war drums

By ANNE McHARDY Herald correspondent

LONDON - Three times last week I walked the 3.2km from my home in Highbury, North London, to the Angel, Islington, overtaking buses as I went.

It was the quickest way to get to the bank, the dentist and the bookshop. I considered hailing a taxi to drive around the traffic jams - but every side turn was blocked too, and the taxis were locked in as hard as everyone else.

My husband each day drove 24km across London to work - a journey taking 1 1/4 hours. From all parts of London come similar complaints: all transport is locked solid daily and sections of the Underground are being regularly closed.

I also drove a 580km round trip to Wales - taking five hours each way - to collect my parents for Christmas. I did it not because they are too old to travel alone but because the rail service across England's heartland to London involves three companies and two train changes and is too unreliable for even fit 79-year-olds to contemplate.

I spent most of the drive trying to plan a way around the junction where the M1, the M6 and the M54 motorways converge west of Birmingham.

When I went to university in London in 1964 there were several direct trains each day, reliably taking four hours.

That was before Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives began rail privatisation, a policy continued enthusiastically by the present Prime Minister, Tony Blair and his New Labour Government.

My 22-year-old son lives in Manchester, a city important enough to deserve good communications with London. His train journey to my home, which used to take under three hours, is regularly five, lengthened by rail "improvement" works since a train crash north of London a year ago. He has just graduated from Manchester University and is now, like most of his peers, burdened with a £12,000 ($36,600) student loan debt and the prospect of being expected to work free, as "work experience", to try to break into his chosen profession.

His three younger siblings are at various stages of the education process, all experiencing the increasingly bitter divide within education in Britain, as New Labour again steals Conservative clothes and encourages private investment in education, private control of individual schools and an elitist divide between the academic schools that Cabinet ministers choose for their own children and what one Cabinet minister described as "bog standard" comprehensive schools.

The Government, since the northern summer, has admitted failing to reach the targets it set itself, when it was first elected six years ago, for improvement in education. It now describes some of the former standards for raising reading and numeracy levels as having been unrealistic. It was the failure to reach targets that caused the last Education Secretary, Estelle Morris, to resign in October.

The term "unrealistic" was also used by the Transport Secretary, Alasdair Darling, about transport and pollution reduction targets set by the first Labour Transport Secretary, the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott.

Darling said that the Government had spectacularly underestimated the growth in road traffic. In effect, he was saying that the policy of encouraging bus and train use and the reduction in cars and their pollution was being scrapped in favour of building more roads. New Labour has now caved in to the car lobby.

Darling made his confession on the day that the Works and Pension Secretary, Andrew Smith, said that the Government is to scrap the compulsory retirement age of 65, allowing people to work into their 70s, as a way around the admission that pension funds could not cope with the growing numbers of old people.

It prompted some harsh headlines. As the Guardian, a left-of-centre broadsheet, put it: "Future Britain: save more, work longer - and stay off the roads."

The Blair Government, which is also under sustained attack from all levels of society over its determined support for the United States' belligerence against Iraq, has failed to deflect public anger from its growing list of failed targets and broken promises.

It has also failed to stop the flow of caustic comment over the Prime Minister's wife, Cherie Blair, and her involvement with Australian conman Peter Foster, who helped her negotiate the buying of two flats in Bristol, where oldest son Euan has just started at one of Britain's most prestigious universities.

The Blair Government continues to be saved from serious political attack by the weakness of Iain Duncan Smith, leader of the main opposition Conservative Party but the daily papers are all adopting the opposition mantle.

The Daily Mirror, traditionally a Labour supporter, is now regularly on the attack. A recent front page featured a picture of US President George W. Bush with a dog that had Blair's face superimposed, and the single-word headline, "Warkies". Walkies is what the English offer their dogs as exercise. War is where Bush is taking Blair, or so the growing fear is in Britain.

The Government's attempts to persuade the electorate that involvement with the Americans in the Middle East is wise appear as ineffective as an increasing number of its public-services policies.