THERE has been much fuss about Tony Blair using private school teachers to coach his sons. Why?

Socialists, and Tony Blair is a Socialist, no matter what impression he contrives to give, have always justified to themselves what is best in our society, be it education, salaries, pensions, health services, transport, while denying similar standards to the rest of us.

Labour MPs cheered Gordon Brown to the rafters when he staged a £25 billion raid on the pensions of ordinary working people. Recently, MPs voted through an exorbitantly expensive pension scheme for themselves, funded largely by public money. Why do taxpayers tolerate such double standards?

Can we really trust the politicians who blew almost £1 billion on the Millennium Dome to assign our money wisely in the latest government-spending spree? The Chancellor says we can, because he is creating a whole new class of auditors to check on the system delivering the cash.

But who will monitor this new class of auditors to make sure they are doing their jobs correctly? Mr Brown has thought of that, too. A separate class of super auditors will check on the work of the auditors who will in turn check on the work of the people spending the money!

No doubt they will all need assistants and deputies and PAs. New IT and HR departments will have to be created to look after this new bureaucracy. Let's not forget, there will also have to be a sexual equality outreach unit, a racial discrimination task force, a social inclusiveness monitoring department, a gay and lesbian empowerment initiative, and a trans-sexual gender realignment workshop. Not to mention the person employed to hand out free condoms in the toilets.

And so this army of highly-paid pen-pushers will grow like a rash of untreated bed sores until all the taxpayers' money has been safely used up, and the paper boy demands heavy lifting gear to deliver the public sector job page of The Guardian.

In five years, when small schools and old people's homes are shut, when street crime is sky high, when the NHS has finally collapsed, when the railways remain broken, when our own currency is abolished, and when Labour ministers still refuse to touch their local comprehensive with a barge pole, we will gawp at each other and ask: "I wonder where all the money went?"

JEAN ALLISON (Mrs),

Ramsbottom.