'WE'VE got to listen to the people... to the concerns that worry them.'' Thus Gordon Brown, in the wake of Labour's thrashing in the local elections. Nothing new there, then.

Mr Brown's remarks, on Radio 4's Today, came shortly after an item about the NHS's out-of-hours medical care. Branded "a costly mess'' by the National Audit Office - the official spending watchdog - which says the transfer of night-time care from GPs to Primary Care Trusts has cost £70m more than planned, this has attracted more crucial criticism from the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee. Its chairman, Edward Leigh, insists the switch has "left many sick people waiting too long for help".

Most people, I'm sure, would prefer out-of-hours care still to be provided by GPs. Are you listening, Mr Brown?

Among the Chancellor's own first acts was a £2bn raid on private pension funds, which he continues to plunder. He has thereby added the wreckage of private schemes to that of the state pension, sabotaged by Mrs Thatcher.

Will Mr Brown now take steps to encourage a revival of the once-prized final salary pension schemes? More important, will he restore the link between earnings and the state pension - for all pensioners, not just the over 75s, as has been hinted at.

Security in old age would come high in any poll to find the public's top concerns. But crime would run it close. Mirrored in the highest re-offending rate in Western Europe, New Labour's "tough on the causes of crime" has clearly been a dismal failure. So will the Government please implement "tough on crime".

Will sentences be revised so that, for instance, it is no longer possible that the most severe punishment that can be given to a 17-year-old who attacks a teacher, scarring him for life, is a six-month "detention and training order"? Will the recommended minimum "indefinite" sentence for rapists and other serious offenders no longer often be around five or six years, but 15, 20, or more?

Will the routine remission on a prison sentence revert from the present half to no more than a third - with provision for none at all? Fundamentally, will the law line up behind a determination that, in any given neighbourhood, the decent, law-abiding citizens, the vast majority, shall be able to live their lives free from intimidation by yobs and thugs?

New Labour has never listened to the people. Its founding Mafia, Tony Blair. Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson, perhaps Alan Milburn, cooked up a so-called Project whose unwanted creations - "Foundation' Hospitals, "Trust' Schools (actually sponsored schools) - are still being foisted on us. Backstage, big business has exerted huge influence, exposed in initiatives like the encouragement of casinos, which the public has certainly not asked for.

The public doesn't want bigger police forces or regional government. But, openly or by subterfuge, the Government is imposing them. In umpteen towns, including Middlesbrough, people don't want their homes bulldozing in a bizarre re-run of discredited 1960s "regeneration".

Deaf to the people for so long, New Labour now faces a major obstacle to listening, or at any rate hearing: all of us are speaking at once.