2005 is set to be election year in the UK - the one in which Tony Blair bids for a third term of office for New Labour.
It is already clear that the platform for reelection will involve a dogged defence of Blair's warmongering record in Iraq and elsewhere, and seeking to whip up a level of public hysteria over security at home sufficient to justify spending billions on a controversial system of ID cards.
Public hysteria on these issues, spilling over into Islamaphobia, will also help to secure an electoral base for New Labour's vicious policies on asylum and immigration.
But Blair wants to do much more: he wants to leave a standing legacy of marketstyle "reforms" which do as much to undermine public services as Clement Attlee's post 1945 Labour government did to establish them.
Already two Blair terms have seen sweeping measures drive substantial wedges of private provision into the National Health Service, education and social services (see pages 6,7 and 8), while the state pension system has been hacked back further to a shadow of its former self and private sector pensions have been shamelessly attacked by grasping employers.
Seven years in office with massive parliamentary majorities have apparently been enough time to invent and impose student fees and top-up fees which were not in the manifesto, but have not yet been enough to carry through the manifesto promises of democratic reform of the House of Lords, or the Third time as fiasco? abolition of fox-hunting, which has now been cynically left in the long grass in the run-up to polling day.
But now, with the Tory Party flat on its back, lacking any serious hope of revival until long Michael Howard follows lain Duncan Smith, William Hague and John major into the dustbin of history, we are warned that a third term could see a renewed "modernising" thrust from New Labour.
Many of the measures seem set to drag us back towards the period before the welfare state: according to the Guardian, pride of place appears to be taken by plans to bring back more streaming in schools, but it seems likely that new whips will be cracked to force claimants of incapacity benefit to find work, and to further turn the screw on lone parents eking out a life on benefits.
New policy guru and archmoderniser Alan Milburn is tweaking up a new system designed to privatise more social housing - even as property prices boosted by the demise of council housing continue to spiral upwards and out of reach of many poor families.
On top of these new proposals, we already know that New Labour will be ramming home the onslaught it has already begun against civil servants, against public sector pensions, and further intensifying the drive towards privatisation, with the Royal Mail one of the prime targets.
And with Bush reelected, and the prospect of a decade or more of occupation in Iraq, we can expect little change in Blair's foreign policy, which has consisted of doing George Dubya's bidding and seeking
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New Labour will be ramming home its onslaught against civil servants, against public sector pensions, and further intensifying the drive towards privatisation to sell the same policies within the EU. With all informed sources suggesting a May election, it is already clear that the leaders of the major unions have SOCIALIST RESISTANCE is a monthly marxist paper. We are offering a special introductory subscription rate 1 year for £12 (UK), £15 (Europe) or E20 (other overseas. For more details fill in this coupon, ticking the appropriate box and send to us: PO Box 1109 London N4 2UU Please make cheques payable to RESISTANCE • Please send me a year's subscription to the new paper. I enclose £12 L £15 • £20 • I enclose a donation of £.... • Please put me in touch with the nearest RESISTANCE readers'