Are you listening?

And no time like the present, as he is faced with three hard-hitting reports that savage the Prime Minister's obsession with allowing the private sector to leech on public services.

The lesson to draw is that encouraging the private sector in the railways, the postal services and the NHS is a recipe for disaster.

Opinion poll after opinion poll has confirmed public hostility to this parasitic practice, but Mr Brown has lost no opportunity to nail his colours to privatisation's rickety mast over the past 11 years of Labour government.

He was the architect of the public-private partnership on the London Underground, which then deputy prime minister John Prescott insisted must be in place, with contracts signed, before London mayor Ken Livingstone could assume his transport responsibilities.

That particular scheme has not only milked the public purse of billions of pounds but has also ended in failure, with the bankruptcy of the Metronet consortium.

But, far from learning its lesson, the Brown government is insisting on a similar structure to oversee the public investment of £600 million in the necessary upgrade of the successfully run, publicly owned Tyne & Wear Metro system.

Mr Brown should listen to the complaints that his original scheme threw up and to the helpful advice of rail unions RMT and ASLEF and then acknowledge the necessity of keeping all Tyne & Wear Metro maintenance in-house.

While he is allowing that information to sink in, the PM should pay attention to the independent review of the postal services that was commissioned by the government itself.

To the shock of Mr Brown himself and free-market zealot Business Secretary John Hutton, the review confirms the assessment that most people in Britain had already made, advocated and seen ignored by the government.

This assessment is that postal services liberalisation, which was decreed in EU directive 97/67/EC in 1997, followed up by directive 2002/39/EC in 2002, has been a godsend for big business but has threatened the services that ordinary people have relied upon for generations.

The government must listen to the statements that there has been "no significant benefit" for consumers and small businesses, that there is a "substantial threat" to the universal postal service and that "the status quo is not tenable."

There will be no prizes for guessing what advice Mr Hutton will proffer. His outlook is based on the uncanny logic that, if private-sector penetration has messed things up, the only way to fix them is further private-sector penetration.

If Mr Brown listens to postal workers and consumers, he will draw the opposite conclusion.

And he should do the same with the NHS, the jewel in the crown of the post-war Labour government, which still has a special place in the heart of Labour voters or erstwhile voters.

Health Emergency's advice to replace NHS private finance initiatives with direct public procurement, to scrap plans to hand over GP services to US transnationals, to suspend A&E closures and to end the target culture should be heeded.

Well, Mr Brown, are you listening?