ANXIOUS to appear in tune with the public, Tony Blair's "People's Government" periodically tests its policy ideas at so-called focus groups of voters, but perhaps Labour strategists would do well to read tonight's newspaper to see what the score is.

For as the party conference looms - an event already sanitised so that critical motions from the grassroots may be debated in private - it appears that the government and the people are no longer in such unison and that the long honeymoon Labour has enjoyed is over.

While the government may find it convenient for internal discord to be kept in closed session at the conference - on such issues, for instance, as nurses' pay and recruitment crisis - outside in the real world, the voices of criticism and dissent are getting louder.

We have a leading East Lancashire industrialist blasting the government as, like others. his firm suffers the effects of a strong pound that makes exports dearer and imports cheaper.

And while Mr Tony Rink, of Darwen-based printing products firm Wolstenholme Rink, admits that world events influence the level of sterling, he blames the government's management of the economy for seriously damaging UK manufacturing industry to the benefit of its international competitors. Then, on education - Labour's flagship policy issue - we find the head teacher of East Lancashire's leading independent school ripping into the government's "simplistic and even paradoxical" analysis of the problems.

It may be that, in the criticism of Mr David Hempsall, head of Blackburn's Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, there is a touch of professional teacher resentment at the politicians' assumptions that they know what is best for education, but his point about the manner which these are made perhaps underlines the difference between the government's purported responding-to-the-people approach and the actuality of policy implementation.

Mr Hempsall seems to be pointing to an authoritarian style that is at odds with the government's supposed listening posture - and with a good many voters.

Indeed, the government finds itself warned today on this very point - by one of its own senior MPs. For says Chris Mullin, chairman of the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, the "unhealthy authoritarian streak in New Labour" needs to be kept under control and party leaders should bear in mind that they do not necessarily know best.

In short, what Tony Blair is being told that a large majority does not make Labour immune to either criticism or error - and that there can be a sharp price for believing otherwise.

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