The biggest earners were Britain's 850 Oxfam shops - very few chain stores have more outlets - and each shop nets an average profit of pounds 418 a week.Such success has increasingly led, despite the philanthropic intentions of charity shops, to widespread resentment from many small businesses, jealous of the mandatory 80 per cent cut in business rates that charity shops enjoy. A number of businesses are even mean-spirited enough to complain that charity shops steal their trade.But it's not just local businessmen that today's charity shops have to contend with - it's themselves. In the last few years, such shops have been opening at a ferocious rate, which has led to extremely fierce competition for donated goods and volunteers."Boot sales have also really affected donated goods," explains Mrs Smith, rashly putting 25p price stickers on some James Last, Richard Clayderman and Chris de Burgh cassettes. "We used to get stuff good enough to go to auction, but not now."Some staff simply don't know the cream from the dross: many charities don't give their staff much or any training in valuing items correctly, apart from a handful of basic guidelines. It's no surprise, then, that treasure slips through the net."These people don't know what they're selling, they haven't got a clue," says male model Phil Anderson, 30, on a regular shopping trip to his local Greenwich charity stores. "I've just been to Mencap and bought a Dunhill denim blouson, which retails for about 150 quid They're selling it for six quid. I buy Marks and Spencer shirts for pounds 2.75 all the time, all washed and ironed for you.

At that price you could wear them once and then throw them away."Anderson is surprised at how stock can vary so considerably from area to area. "I found Kensington was bad, while Brighton and Bromley are good. At a Chiswick shop it looked like a wife had had an argument and dumped all her husband's clothes. I paid pounds 20 for about a thousand pounds' worth of stuff," he says.Despite such problems, the underpricing of goods and increased competition for customers, donations and volunteers, the Red Cross's John Tough is very optimistic about the future. "Only 51 per cent of the adult shopping population has ever bought anything from a charity shop, so 49 per cent haven't used them. There's a vast untapped market out there," he says, with undisguised gleen.

It is beginning to look as though Labour might win the election, but lose the campaign. Tony Blair's determination to repeat the mistake Neil Kinnock made last time, of allowing himself to be portrayed as the incumbent and John Major as the challenger, may not prove fatal to Labour's hopes, but it is a poor way to set about winning. Something is fundamentally wrong with a Labour campaign that responds so defensively to the charge that the party has changed That, it was thought, was the whole point of Mr Blair It was his proud boast And so it should be still This election is about trust They usually are. But this time, it is apparent that neither main party is trusted by the electorate. Opinion polls will not tell you that, because trust is not a directly measurable commodity. It is, though, an observable fact. The reasons why people do not trust the Tories are almost too obvious to need repeating: they betrayed their promise on taxes, and they are deeply divided over Europe. Labour is not trusted, either - but for different reasons, which have in many ways only now been brought into focus by the election campaign.

The campaign has concentrated voters' minds on the fact that, contrary to their expectations, they are not at all sure what kind of a creature the Labour Party now. And that, sure enough, makes them uneasy.As so often in politics, it took something relatively minor to trigger this change in mood. The privatisation of air traffic control is not a big issue for anyone other than air traffic controllers It is an issue of substance, but not one of the front rank. Yet this relatively minor question has cracked Mr Blair's facade of certainty. For some time the Labour leader has been impressively determined, clear and leaderly. Suddenly the little boy (a role played in this pantomime by the electorate) has pointed out that he has no clothes, by asking in a loud voice: "But what is he determined, clear and leaderly about?"The U-turn on privatisation does not look like a considered move in Labour's modernisation, it looks like a panic reaction to the belated discovery that Labour would not have privatisation receipts to make the numbers add up in government.One still, small voice from many months ago can now be heard clearly, echoing through the silences of Labour's campaign. Charles Clarke, who was Mr Kinnock's minder and so knows how an election campaign can go pear- shaped, warned that the details of Labour policies were insufficiently worked out This mattered, he said, for two reasons.

The first is that a bit of detail helps candidates and spokespeople who otherwise have to waffle and evade. The second is that it ensures that Labour ministers would have something for civil servants to do, rather than the other way around.But Mr Clarke is now only the candidate in Norwich South, and other counsels have prevailed. If he were still a free man, rather than a bonded New Labourer, he might now be making other observations. For example, he might point out that one of Mr Kinnock's big mistakes last time was to announce a policy change in the middle of the election campaign - in his case on changing the voting system, an issue that rolled out of control in the last week.Professional as it undoubtedly is, why did Mr Blair's campaign machine fail to anticipate that Labour would be forced to defend its record? Just like Mr Kinnock, Mr Blair is being challenged by the voters to explain why they should trust him when he has changed his mind on many of the important political issues. Mr Blair and his aides, instead of confidently expounding the reason for change (it is what you, the voters wanted) sound most put out.