MORI pollsters, on behalf of the BBC's Today programme, have invented a new category of voters. The Meldrews, named after the incomparable Victor, are consistently angry, feeling that the public services upon which they rely are of poor and declining standards.

They resent the fact that working overtime, even if it is paid overtime, breaks into their free time, and feel the leadership of both political parties have let them down and continue to do so.

If it were not for the fact that they have restricted those eligible to fit into the Meldrew category to an age range, I would have thought that about 90 per cent of the population would have felt themselves eligible.

It is almost impossible to find anyone who thinks that the public services are doing as good a job as they could.

From air traffic controllers, the police, public transport workers, the teaching profession and most notably to the NHS, everyone complains.

We have become a nation of complainers, though those complaints often arise not from personal experience, but from a vague feeling that better things were promised, but have not materialised. Often they were not promised, but implied.

When improvements are expected experience should tell us that they will not all be delivered. This is not cynicism, it is realism. Our political leaders seem to think that with a wave of the wand they can make huge differences to the state of our world. After a long period of opposition they might believe this.

After a period in Government they should know that step changes in efficiency and the ability of the public services to deliver are unlikely. We are lucky to get small improvements year on year. We are quite likely to get deterioration.

Rural areas do not have all that many voters. Given that any government's chief ambition is to get re-elected, rural areas do not get much attention paid to them.

They hit headlines occasionally. Foot and Mouth Disease or BSE directs entirely the wrong sort of attention to them. Governments spend fortunes of our money on clearing up such preventable messes.

There is no long term strategic plan for rural areas, or if there is it is difficult to spot. There seems to be a view that the rural areas are a sort of back garden for the towns, and that they can survive on bits of money spilling over from the towns.

This is not so. The problems are quite different. To start with the isolation and distances involved make the provision of adequate public transport far more important in the countryside. This does not seem to have been spotted.

For example, the parking requirements of those from the country who work in the towns could be lessened if people were encouraged to take journeys by bus.

It might be cheaper to subsidise buses, than to build new car parking in town. But that is a different pocket and the powers that be do not seem to think across departmental boundaries, let alone across local authority boundaries.

Part of the feeling that things are not as they should be derives from expectations being raised which could never be fulfilled.

They should not have been raised. Realism should break out. There will always be problems, in all walks of life. Things will always go wrong, mistakes will always be made.

Perhaps one of our leaders would like to make that part of their election manifesto.

I should think that they will continue to imply improvements they cannot achieve, until the Meldrews throw them out. As usual.

Updated: 10:39 Tuesday, August 27, 2002