WHEN it comes to voting for Tony Blair, let me try to spread a little apathy. For a start, there's more reality in Big Brother than there has been throughout Blair's election campaign. It's all been spin and smoke and mirrors, deceitful propaganda and phoney statistics about how much his Government has done for schools and hospitals. Every event graced (I'm sure that's the wrong word) by Blair's presence has been staged-managed for the television cameras. The one time he was accidentally confronted with a real voter - the woman complaining about hospital waiting lists, remember - his grin and his slogans failed him and he was left squirming like a fish on the slab at Whitby.

Well, you might say all election campaigns are phoney and a tedious interruption to normal life. But Blair's four years of Government have been one long election campaign. Do you remember, before the 1997 election, his slogan was: "We have 48 hours to save the National Health Service"? What's the reality? In 48 months the NHS has got worse, and last week senior consultants described our hospitals as "as bad as those in the Third World". Many experienced doctors are so frustrated by the amount of paper work they are obliged to do that they are threatening to leave the NHS altogether.

Now Blair says: "Give me another chance and my Government will transform the health service in our second term." But it won't. He claims he will pour billions more taxpayers' money into the NHS. But what's the point of pouring billions into a system that just wastes it? And, in any case, the problem is not shortage of money but the absence of proper skills and practice. Remember last year's report which said many nurses haven't the first clue about elementary hygiene. We're not talking about advanced sterilisation techniques here, but about the ordinary use of soap and water. Last year, 50,000 people came out of our hospitals having picked up an infection they didn't have when they went in.

Ask yourself whatever became of John "Bruiser" Prescott's "Integrated Transport Policy". I've travelled regularly around the country these last four years and journeys have got more nightmarish as time has rolled on. The trains are crowded, filthy and almost invariably late. And if the arteries in your legs were as clogged up as our roads, you'd have been dead years ago. Prescott was going to do something about the squalor and delays on the London Underground. Nothing has been done. Just to go into a tube station and on to the train is to feel the need of a mask to keep out the stench and a blindfold to shield your eyes from the mess that is the carriages. The tube trains are even filthier than the hospitals.

The Government is incompetent and arrogant with it. It will not listen to criticism. Blair has massive contempt for the House of Commons and only turns up once a week - where he's slaughtered in debate by William Hague. I see catastrophe ahead if Blair is given a second term. There is going to be an economic crisis and perhaps even a world political crisis. Blair will use these developments to take even more powers to himself and his cronies. I do not say even to his Cabinet: for in Blair's version of national authority it's government by cronies and an army of unelected propagandists.

Now that I've mentioned propaganda, I should add that I've just finished reading a chilling book called The Language of the Third Reich. O boy! Guess what I found? Hitler was known throughout the 1930s as "The People's Chancellor"; there was a general injunction to be "politically correct" and the most popular slogan of the Nazis was, "Modernise!". It couldn't happen here of course, could it?

Published: Tuesday, June 5, 2001