GIVEN outgoing East Lancashire Euro-MP Mike Hindley's former fondness for the walled-in paradise of Communist East Germany, with its secret police and papier-mM- ch, two-stroke cars, I cannot be 100 per cent sure of his judgment.

But I am right behind his healthly criticism of Tony Blair's control freakery, to which he drew attention last week with a stinging parthian shot in which he labelled the Prime Minister a madcap Tory. The trouble is, I think, that Mr Hindley is a little ahead of developments in forecasting Blair's Armageddon.

Ordinary voters have not yet woken up to his obsession with power and his determination to brook no criticism: which is why Mr Hindley had as much chance of ending up on a party list of Labour Euro candidates this time round as I did.

But I am grateful to Mr Hindley for putting down a marker at this juncture that draws attention to the immensely-popular PM's I'm-in-charge arrogance. It is displayed in his bothering to attend just one out of three Cabinet meetings of late; in his being "seething" at Prince Charles' daring to questioning his belief that genetically-modified foods are safe; in his reduction of Prime Minister's Question Time to just once a week; and his telling Labour MPs that they are not a pressure group to pass on voters' concerns, but ambassadors for government policy - which is, surely, another way of saying they must be missionaries for the commandments laid down by Tony Blair. We need dissenters like Mr Hindley - and such as Ken Livingstone, Tony Benn and Dennis Skinner - to stick thorns in the side of such bossy boots, even if they are not always right on the issues over which they do so.

Otherwise, we have the kind of undemocratic elective dictatorship that characterised the Thatcher years - and right though Maggie was about many things, including sapping the overweening power of the trade unions and the innate fairness of the poll tax, the bumptious should always have the bothersome snapping at their heels like this.

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