EVEN though much has happened since the Tory Party Conference, I still think that it's worth reflecting on it.

After the Labour Party Conference, I made some cautious criticisms of Tony Blair's public finance initiative. I think that we ought to be even more cautious about the policies presented by Iain Duncan Smith.

His 21 new policies announced at the conference were not new at all. They were simply the old privatisation policies of Margaret Thatcher wrapped up differently.There is no doubt that Thatcher did bring in a revolution in British politics. Her government drew heavily on the ideas of the Chicago theorists of a decade earlier suggesting that state finance of public service was bad and that private finance was good.

The trouble with this idea is that many of the moves towards privatisation have proved to be wholly bad. We only have to look at the railways to see this.

Privatisation of council housing in particular has had enormous effects on the poverty gap, and on the North/South divide. It means that there are huge gaps between the rich and the poor when it comes to housing. And now lain Duncan Smith wants to extend this. He want tenants of housing associations to have the right to buy. In the short term, this might seem like a good idea. But, in the long term, it can only serve to drive an even deeper wedge between the rich and the poor, the North and the South.

He also wants to privatise schools. Instead of providing free places for every child in state schools, he wants to give each parent or guardian £5,000 and allow them to spend it in public or state schools as they wish.

This idea sounds fine. It would increase parental choice and it would show up failing schools for what they were. But would it really? No, it would simply divide rich and poor further and it would undermine struggling schools that were trying their hardest to do better. The idea is at least 200 years old, it is certainly not new.

It may well suit those upwardly-mobile parents who could move and take advantage of so-called successful schools, but it would seriously disadvantage those who were unable to move and had to rely on local schools.

Why not simply be honest and say that privatisation would help the rich but deprive the poorest? We don't need the worn-out theories of the 1960s in Chicago, or 18th and 19th century ideas on school funding. What we need is a new vision for the relationship between the private and public sector.

Only with such a new vision will we honour the deep concern of God for the poor.

Michael Williams, Vicar of Bolton Parish Church