Do you remember how you felt on May 1st 1997? Did you feel that it was the beginning of a new era or did you think that Tony Blair's New Labour were just a party without any ideological core dedicated to just winning at any cost?

I remember that for many it seemed that with the Tories defeated then somehow life would not only be better but it would be happier too as if by slaying Thatcher's Dragon we could all venture out into the light again and see that the world was beautiful.

And now we are near the end and our relationship as a country with Gordon Brown seems like that between a couple on the edge of divorce. A time when even ones virtues come to be seen as vices and the brightness and joy of the wedding day seem to have happened to someone else so distant and alien does it seem.

Now I really should declare myself here as I was an early fan of Tony Blair and believe to this day that a Labour Party led by the virtuous John Smith would still have come just a close second to the Tories at election time and if you think that's ok then you really believe that it is better to be right and impotent rather than to compromise and have the power to really change things.

You see when Tony Blair said "Tough on Crime, Tough on the Causes of Crime" I really took notice. As a teacher I am part of a system that really doesn't hold to Tony's truism when translated to education which would be "Tough on Bad behaviour, Tough on the Causes of Bad Behaviour". We don't like to be tough on bad behaviour as that smacks of punishment and punishment is a 'bad' thing. So we explain, their behavior is a product of forces we cannot control or condemn, or it is a sickness. There is even still a little part of education that thinks that expecting children to behave is to coin a Seventies phrase "Imposing Middle Class Values on Working Class Kids" as if expecting kids not to victimise the weak is somehow the parallel of eating peas with your knife. Within that rather warped view bad behaviour is somehow almost to be sneakily admired as it is sticking up fingers to authority making bullies and thugs heroes of the Revolution if only they could be properly politicised.

So Tony seemed to be with me on that, acknowledging that crime and bad behaviour needs tackling face on as well as working to remove the causes.

I was also with him when he said he wanted to do what worked and not to be hidebound by ideology. This seemed to make perfect sense to me but sadly we disagreed on our measure of what worked for Tony that often seemed to be 'business' and not a cautious and thorough scientific approach hence the spreading of consultancy like some virus and solutions always 'top down' because Mr Blair and colleagues didn't trust the rank and file. Perhaps that was because they had lived through a Labour Party that had almost committed suicide and so they felt they genuinely did know best but that is no excuse for arrogance and a high handed refusal to listen to and value genuinely those that do the job which you wish to change. Through that attitude very little gets changed in education because those that have to do the job, do what works and simply pay lip service to the bullshit.

But I wonder what the people of Sierre Leone and Kosovo and also Northern Ireland think of Mr Blair and New Labour. For them things did get better and in a way that the rest of us perhaps hoped for ourselves but maybe we were foolish to expect politicians to make us happier, perhaps that is simply not within their power?