Shower of empty words

Apart from raising political illiteracy to an art form, Ms Blears appears to believe that it is her task to confuse, obfuscate and blur every serious political issue current today until it all becomes a vague mass of hopefully well-meaning but, to all practical purposes, useless verbiage.

In her latest speech to the Fabian Society, an organisation itself so woolly that it probably deserves Ms Blears's discourse as a penance, the Communities Secretary managed to do a disservice to every single minority community in the country, no mean feat in an island as diverse and multicultural as our own.

She exhibits in full measure the new Labour gift of denouncing everything that new Labour has been instrumental in producing.

Does Ms Blears really believe that she can get away with expressing public concern about "affluence being used to create a kind of separateness, a social apartheid between rich and poor," as a member of a government which has presided over the huge and obscene growth of multimillion-pound payouts in City bonuses and has collaborated in overfilling the pension pots of the super-rich while denying state pensioners even the basics of social justice, a pension linked to what everyone else is earning?

And can she really expect to get away with bragging about "building our three million new homes and creating our new communities," when the government is expected to complete a mere 2,500 council houses this year, despite Prime Minister Gordon Brown's boasts about a new era of social housing?

Weasel words about "mixtures of tenure, size of property and household size" are all very well, but how does Ms Blears expect to attract those people on the upside of the gap between rich and poor, which under her government has grown from a huge gulf to a yawning chasm, to live in the areas which that government's policies have seen decay as the residents struggle to find work or to exist on the pathetic minimum wage?

And the racism which is becoming more noticeable in every new Labour pronunciation is by no means absent from Ms Blears's view of the world.

"No neighbourhood," she says, "should be dominated by one group in ways which make members of other groups feel alienated, insecure or unsafe."

Right on, Ms Blears. Should we take it that you are talking about building social housing and traveller sites in the midst of the posh leafy enclaves that surround London, because those are the areas in which you can find the group that makes most of us feel alienated, the rich and the parasites?

Should we believe that you are fighting for the comfortably off to move to Blackbird Leys, the Stonebridge estate or Easterhouse?

Or is it all just another snipe at the Muslim communities which have grown up in areas across Britain?

And, by the way, Ms Blears, don't just blame the planners and designers for sink estates, when your government's miserly policies on housebuilding and dumping the disadvantaged in designated ghettoes have done more to create those estates than the architects ever did.

New Labour has a lot to answer for and it is about time that people like Ms Blears started providing those answers, rather than blithely attempting to cover up their responsibility for the problems in the first place.