AFTER 13 years of Labour government, the big question that has to be asked is whether Britain is a more socially just society than it was when John Major, aided and abetted by the likes of John Redwood and Peter Lilley, was in charge.

Improving social justice was Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s big idea. It was the concept that replaced the “old” and unpopular Labour ideas of controlling the commanding heights of the economy and large- scale redistribution of income.

These ideas included the creation of child and pensioner tax credits, concepts that were meant to help lift Britain’s young and old out of poverty. There wasn’t a Budget speech in the past decade when either Gordon Brown or Alistair Darling didn’t claim to have lifted many thousands of children out of poverty. Child tax credits are worth several hundred pounds a month to low-income households, so they must have made a difference to the poorest.

Labour, of course, was able to achieve these policy objectives on the back of a credit-fuelled economic boom, which coincided with the majority of its time in power since 1997. Rapidly rising tax revenues meant Labour could afford to be generous with tax credits and public sector pay, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of extra public sector jobs it created in recent years.

All of this would, we were told, be achieved without raising income tax, a promise that has recently been broken. Furthermore, Labour found new, stealthy ways of taxing us, such as the changes to advance corporation tax, which hit the nation’s retirement savings.

While much has been done to improve public services such as the NHS, the fact is most of it would probably have been achieved whoever was in power. Benign economic conditions would have allowed it to happen. The chances are that, had the Conservatives been in power, much of the extra medicine would have been delivered to patients, but at a lower cost.

The fact is there are huge savings to be found in the public sector. It is going to be difficult for anybody whose jobs are dependent on public sector spending, but Labour’s past largesse has made it a flabby target. Significant cuts in public spending are the right way to restore the nation’s finances to health. Tax rises, on the other hand, are likely to stifle enterprise.

It is therefore time for the Tories to take their turn back in government.

THE Shanghai World Expo is in full swing – or is it?

Yes, all the delegates have touched down and the show has been officially declared open, but where are the promised crowds?

The number of visitors during the first few days are half of what were expected. No reason has been offered for the disappointing turn-out.

It’s a situation that reminds me of the problems seen at the Millennium Dome exhibition in 2000. There were some hugely optimistic predictions published in advance of the event. Those figures turned out to be nothing much more than guess work, bad guess work at that.

I suspect, though, the Chinese government will be able to save face more readily than the British government could ten years ago. Their more autocratic style means they can cut admission prices to induce greater participation by the population as the weeks pass by. What is crucial to Liverpool’s delegation is not so much the overall number of visitors, but the quality of them. We are there to foster trade links and investors, not to promote Liverpool to China’s general public.