At long last Tony Blair has announced a possible date of departure. This for most socialist minded people should be a day to celebrate you might think.

Well it would be a good day if the leader replacing him was made of sterner stuff and didn't pander to the right wing Tories within the party.

I had, a year or two ago, at least a small degree of optimism that Gordon Brown would bring back an element of socialism to the party, but this sadly does not seem to be the case.

We still today ten years after the famous 97 lanslide victory at the polls seem to need radical changes to most if not all public services. The railways, Gas, Electric companies as well as the water companies should all by now have been re-nationalized.

We hear every summer, every year, water companies bleating on about drought in the south east of England. Yet daily management allow millions of litres of water to run away because of a lack of investment in the infrastructure, new equipment and pipelines to replace antiquated victorian equipment in use presently.

To replace such equipment would of course eat heavily into profit margins, this must never be allowed to happen.

We still have the worst employment laws in europe with the workers of this country finding it almost impossible to make any sort of protest against wrong doing within thier work places. We are the only country within Europe that allows workers to opt out of the European Working Time Directive ( E.W.T.D.).

We still have a law that says that 51% of people within the work place must be union members before companies have to recognise them so that the said union can then represent workers over pay and conditions, this after ten years of a so called labour party.

A party that has a leader who has whole heartedly allied himself with such political allies as Angella Merkel Germanies newly elected right winger. The recently departed right wing Italian leader ( Bruscollini, this is as close as i can get with this name appologies ) and of course the ultra right wing God faring G. Bush.

To add insult to injury we - in the U / K - work some of the longest hours within the E.E.C. with some of the lowest rates of pay within Euro land.

The national min wage is a discrace and should shame most reasonably minded people, this is a scheme that allows employees to pay 16 - 17 year olds as little as £ 3.00 an hour and adults over the age of 22 as little as the lower end £5.00 an hour.

Before any of you tell me that they should be gratefull for this i would ask you to consider how hard it is to raise a family on such low wages.

What we really need to see for the Labour party now is for some one like Tony Benn and people like him to step forward and enter the contest. This would force the party to debate where it started all those years ago when union leaders started a party to look after the interests of the working people.

This in turn would give people a real choice to make between todays old and New Tories, and would no doubt go a long way to removing voter apathy that is a natural result of a nation with no choice on the ballot paper.