THE comments of Blackburn Labour Party secretary Phil Riley (Letters, February 4) are typically trivial.

Does he not know only 28 per cent of the electorate bothered to vote Labour and many of that paltry number are beginning to regret it?

Labour should be ashamed of its performance to date. Just look at its mistakes. The Agriculture Minister has provoked the farmers to throw eggs at him and come out on the streets in protest - something unheard of in living memory.

We have a Treasury minister putting restrictions on people's savings while accepting the benefits of an offshore trust.

There are rumblings about nationalisation once more from the Deputy Prime Minister, with others wanting to take over the National Lottery. Who said Clause Four was dead?

The Minister Without Portfolio is so devoid of ideas that he has recruited an eight-year-old to pull him out of the mire over what should go in the Millennium Dome of Delight.

An education minister, who pontificates about what children should achieve, does not know that 7x8=56.

We have a philandering Foreign Secretary, who sacks his secretary and then considers his mistress for the vacancy.

The Chancellor, who thinks he should be Prime Minister, imposed 17 new tax increases in his first Budget, let the Bank of England impose five increases in interest rates and so incensed the disabled that he, too, was pelted with eggs.

The unelected Lord Chancellor, the Prime Minister's mentor, is threatening to gag the Press like some tinpot dictator.

And Labour's leader of them all spends his time globetrotting and junketing with very little tangible benefit for the people who voted for him and a package of sound bites.

If this is the party Mr Riley is so proud of, he is truly welcome to it.

WALT MEADOWS, Whalley New Road, Blackburn.

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