Today, the Sunday Telegraph inadvertantly lays bare the government's strategy for dealing with the rail strikes. For some months, South West Trains and the RMT union have been locked in a dispute over pay and conditions. The Transport Secretary Stephen Byers has publicly adopted a stance of "non intervention". But you would have to be very naive to think that this government could sit on the fence in a dispute between big business and the workers.

In actual fact, South West trains has recruited up to 4,000 new employees to break the strike. These non-unionised "scab" workers will be used in the coming months as replacements for sacked RMT employees. ASLEF, the train driver's union, is prevented by law from intervening in this dispute. There will be little reaction from the general public, who have been carefully softened up with dozens of "Hard Left on the March" stories in the corporate media.

So this is how New Labour resolves an industrial dispute. The Telegraph (curiously echoing New Labour while pretending to lambast it) maintains that there are only two sides to this dispute - the unions and the customer. No mention is made of the privatised Train Operating Companies (TOCS) who have been granted a license to print money in the form of extortionate fare increases. Big business is simply assumed to always act in the public interest.

The railways are sympomatic of the state of public services in general. The TOCS are run by sleazy millionaires who amassed a fortune out of Thatcherite "deregulation" in the 1980's. South West Trains is owned by Stagecoach, who boss, Brian Souter, is reknowed as a strike breaker and whose personal fortune is estimated at £250 million. Virgin boss Richard Branson recently admitted that the service offered by the West Coast Mainline was "crap" - this did not inhibit him from putting the fares up while basking in his reputation as Britain's best loved fat-cat.

New Labour is not interested in running the public services. Their real agenda is to manoeuvre their corporate friends into positions of power and influence in order to asset-strip the wealth of the nation. Soon, there will be nothing left to privatise. But by this stage, Tony's cronies will have made their millions and left the rest of us with the bill.

Nevertheless, New Labour cannot be seen to be intervening too blatantly in favour of big business. The unions are still nominally tied to the Labour party . . . John Prescott even rents a flat from the RMT. The unions will have to be stiched up on the quiet, using the trusted strategy of "divide and rule". Take on the guards one day - tomorrow will come the turn of the drivers. In the meantime, everyone is left in a spiral of recriminations . . . workers blame each other, their union, the "market"; but no-one has the sense to unite against the greedy fat-cats who are the architects of crony privatisation schemes.

Britain did not become a sleazy oligarchy overnight. It has always been this way. Social justice is nothing more than the window-dressing that disguises the political reality. What matters is not the injustice, but the dashed hopes of yet another generation. There is nothing more incendiary than a broken promise.