Letter: Blair's new Labour looks like old Labour

Sir: You are too kind to Tony Blair (leading article, 27 April). He calls himself a radical; but he doesn't touch the root of anything. He wants fairness and justice; but he doesn't say how to get either of them. He calls for liberty, equality and fraternity (or solidarity); but he doesn't propose anything that would increase any of them.

He wants to reduce state and government control; but (like Margaret Thatcher) he wants to do so by state and government action. He rejects the past of his party; but (again like Margaret Thatcher) he forgets that if you lose your past you have no future. He believes in social morality, the family; but he hasn't learnt that government affects such things only by its own example.

He wants a new centre and centre-left politics; but it looks more like the new centre-right politics of pseudo-socialists, from Australia and New Zealand to France and Spain. He calls it new Labour; but it looks more like old Labour, under Harold Wilson or even Ramsay MacDonald.

Anna Freeman

Leighton Buzzard,

Bedfordshire