LONDON: As we enter the election year, the mood of the voting public has never been so glum, so reticent and, crucially for New Labour's prospects of a radical third term, so ready to believe the worst of politicians. These are not my views but the evidence of focus groups we commissioned among key voters in London and Birmingham who swung enthusiastically to New Labour on May 1 1997 but who now feel utterly betrayed.

The groups were held towards the end of last year to see how the "spirit of 97", when New Labour held out the promise of a "new politics", could be recaptured. The findings revealed a shocking sense of bitterness and cynicism about New Labour and a powerful sense of insecurity about national identity.

The people interviewed were genuinely nostalgic for the political prospects they recalled in 1997. Tony Blair held out real hope of "a bright new future" - "things could only get better". But these hopes were buried under personal emotions of loss and betrayal.

Maureen, from north London, said that she "feels so conned". The view of one man from Birmingham was that "they had proved us wrong". Across all the groups, New Labour politicians were "just a bunch of liars".

The groups revealed a shocking sense of loss over what it means to be English - a loss made worse by what was seen as the latest waves of immigration. Blair, they said, "is anti-English". He supports "any country and religion, except the English". The Iraq war is symbolic because it "shows that politicians don't listen" and "proves where Blair's loyalty is". Pat, from London, summed up the mood: "They have made us a lot of angry people."

This insecurity is assisted by New Labour's desire to be more Tory than the Tories - it sets the agenda for anti-immigration feeling, while not offering any alternative sense of modern national identity. As one man in London put it: "New Labour means Conservative to me."

This is hardly a surprise as the electoral strategy of New Labour now reveals itself as the simple but effective trick of parking its tanks on the Tory lawn and shifting them further to the right. With no electoral competition to Labour's left, the result is inevitably a Labour victory, but on hollow terms for the left. This strategy may win elections but could unleash a political firestorm.

The critical point of alignment between the parties is the market. Labour once aspired to make people the masters of the market - now it has given in to global capitalism by inverting that principle. The fundamental political shift was equating economic efficiency with social justice. Social justice is no longer to be achieved by taming capitalism but by ensuring employability in a global economy. The state will help you with education and training but ultimately you have to stand on your own feet.

Of course, New Labour does good things. Unlike Thatcherism it recognises the role for an active state in achieving economic efficiency, and ultimately it must keep the unions and party on board. But it is New Labour's enlightened neo-liberalism and the political triumph of the market it represents that account for the focus groups' insecurity. No one now enjoys employment or even retirement security. The market, not the state, decides if we have a job. There is no job for life - only a life of worry about how to make ends meet and whether your pension will last as long as you. And the gap between rich and poor grows as uncontested rewards at the top rocket away. Further, key institutions of collectivism and national identity - primarily the welfare state - are under threat from the cold logic of the market, because of New Labour's choice and competition-based reforms. Taxes can't be put up in a global economy so services must become more efficient and move from a basis of care, solidarity and mutualism to a role in delivering a strong economy.

Other key institutions are feeling the remorseless pressure of the market. The BBC and Post Office face reform beyond their original purpose, or even extinction. If this weren't enough, the restructuring of global capitalism visits a third spectre of insecurity in the shape of new waves of migrant workers and asylum seekers, who then "threaten" the meagre welfare services still on offer.

If the left swallows this link between economic efficiency and social justice, then it loses its reason for existence. For it surrenders any alternative notion of what constitutes the good life and the good society. The only show in town becomes the market and consumerised capitalism. It is at this moment that democracy and politics come under the greatest threat. What is the point of voting if, as Jeff from London said, "there is no difference between the parties?" Voters conclude that if politicians aren't in it for a greater cause, they "must be in it for themselves".

Politics becomes "a gravy train" for politicians. What is the point of the state if it offers no security and no protection from the market? If no commitment is given to voters by the political process, then no commitment is returned. A politics that forfeits control reaps a whirlwind of apathy, cynicism and anger. Labour can be in power while the prospects of the left suffer a major setback.

What we are witnessing is nothing but the age-old dilemma between our hunger for security and the desire for freedom. What is new is that a Labour government is relinquishing the tools of collective and democratic intervention and permitting the establishment of a marketized monoculture where freedom is defined only as the ability to shop, not to change the world in which you live - an act that by definition is collective. New Labour has become a party of the living dead. It functions but not for the purpose it was intended. Hope lies, as it always does for the democratic left, in the progressive belief that people can be masters of their own destiny.

But this requires a new politics and sense of collectivism. The objective is neither to retreat from globalization nor to accommodate it, but to find ways of offering democratic security and freedom: the "new politics" New Labour promised but has not delivered. That hope could still be found even amid the bitterness of the focus groups =- people with an innate sense of decency who were relieved that for an hour at least someone listened to them and their enthusiasm for the ways in which democracy and politics could be renewed.-Dawn/The Guardian News Service.