THE great fight has been fought with all their might and the country has delivered its verdict.

But whether the General Election result will lead to any meaningful change remains to be seen.

I probably speak for many people when I say that the current imbalance in society has to be addressed if we are to achieve the levels of fairness that have been lacking for so long.

After eight years of Labour, we have witnessed a number of sectors doing rather well.

There has been the introduction of the minimum wage, for example.

Employers issued dire warnings about the consequences - but even if many jobs have been lost to sweatshops, the greater good has probably been the very real improvements among the lower paid.

Nevertheless, the only real jobs growth has been in the service industries.

It's this area of employment that has benefited most from the legislation of recent times. Sadly, if the present rate of decline continues, manufacturing in this country will just be a memory within 15 to 20 years.

Regardless of the minimum wage, the steady erosion of work to the Far East was probably inevitable. Not even Britain can compete with countries that pay real starvation wages.

Then there is the relative largesse that New Labour has shown towards married people with young families. Improvements in maternity and paternity leave and one-off payments from the Chancellor all made Tony Blair's party an attractive choice for the 30-somethings. New Labour knew instinctively that these were the people to keep sweet. And, shrewdly, Gordon Brown realised that inheritance tax wasn't so much a levy, rather a punishment for daring to work hard and pay off a mortgage.

Ignored since the

revolution

THERE's a substantial proportion of the population that has largely been ignored since the 1997 revolution.

For once, I'm not thinking of the pensioners - who have undoubtedly been treated the most abysmally of all - rather that great wedge of middle-aged workers approaching retirement.

These are the people now in their middle 50s. I include myself in that number and so plainly my mind has been concentrated quite intensely on this issue.

True, the Chancellor let us off the hook regarding ISAs, allowing us to keep more of our savings intact. But whatever benefit was derived from this concession was easily wiped out several times over by the most blatant tax rise in many years - the obscene hike in National Insurance contributions.

New Labour must have thanked God it was not the French with whom they were dealing. The burning barricades would have blacked out the sun by now.

I've never been a fan of New Labour. But the objection was not ideological, of course, because the party has had no raison d'etre since those fabulous old Leftie dinosaurs Foot and Benn drifted away into a dark red sunset.

Actually, it's perfectly feasible to oppose New Labour purely on financial grounds, providing you put all thoughts of our growing involvement with Brussels to one side, and see things just from the position of personal profit and loss.

Note for the new boys

THIS new Parliament will need to come up with real agenda that will benefit Britain's ageing electorate.

This, then, is what I will be looking for as the new boys and girls file into the House of Commons at the start of the next session.

Regrettably, I daresay that such concepts will not be uppermost in their thoughts as they enter the great milking shed.

In the first flush of electoral ecstasy, few will think about picking up the torch for the great forgotten in British politics.

But at some stage, these privileged few hundred who sit in judgement upon the rest of us will have to sit up and take notice of a social group that will soon become politically dangerous.

New Labour - now supported by little more than a third of the electorate - will ignore them at their peril.