Gordon Brown's latest announcement to improve life in the UK, is little more than smoke and mirrors.

As with almost every thing that Gordon Brown does, the latest announcement is little more than smoke and mirrors, it is on a par with Michael Jackson's 'moonwalking,' as it gives the appearance of going forward whilst actually going backwards. This empty vessel of a politician who has only one forward gear, Neoliberalism, makes a last ditch attempt to win over working class voters by acknowledging the very crises in public housing which he and his predecessor create. For if he and Blair on coming into office in 1997 had removed from the Statute book, Thatchers right to buy council homes, and replaced it with a less ridged platform that enabled local councils to use the income they gained from these sales to immediately build replacement homes, there would not be a waiting list today of over 4 million people.

Browns latest silly wheeze to cut NHS waiting lists is to automatically move cancer patient’s into the private health sector after they have waited two weeks for a first appointment, which if one looks at the current level of over charging by the private sector is the height of stupidity. This Neoliberal cretin is unable or unwilling to understand the marketization of health care is a step back into the dark ages of health care; and frightens the life out of working class people, as their support for Obama’s current health care strategy in the USA has proved.

On unemployment Brown reaches for Norman Tebbit’s big stick; whilst the PM honeys up the bankers and multi nationals, he threatens with the loss of their benefits the millions of young people who have been thrown on the dole by his love affair with Neoliberal economics. Like Thatcher before him all this creep can offer our youth is bullying and mockney training schemes, that solely benefit private businesses and multi nationals that operate them.

Once compulsion becomes part of any training scheme it because worse than useless. Those who run these schemes are not paid for the quality of the training they offer but by the number of bodies they get through the door.

Ask any one who was forced on to similar schemes in the 1980s by the Thatcher government, whether they benefited from them and the overwhelming majority will say no.

Ask the previous generation who learnt a craft by attending voluntarily government training courses set up by the Wilson government in the 1960’s, then the answer would be positive.

As someone has already said, what the Brown/Blair governments have been implementing is a form of socialism for the rich. The working classes have been provided with a walk on part in that they make up the numbers which allows big business to draw a large government cheque, whether it is health care, banking or unemployment. The poor man gains a pittance and governmental abuse, whilst the rich man is rewarding out of the national exchequer with great wealth.

That the British Labour Party is lead by a man who is responsible for making the UK the second must unequal country in the Western world proves beyond doubt it is no longer fit for purpose as a progressive vehicle of change.