No confidence in any Establishment politician

So Gordon Brown has survived the vote of no confidence against him. I'm hardly over the moon, as I am one of the losers from Brown's recent budget. His stupid idea of scrapping the 10p tax rate is to sting everyone earning 12000-18000 a year - myself included :-( - while reducing the tax of higher earners. So much for any illusions that Brown may have been any better as PM than Bliar!

But my disappointment is tempered by the fact that the motion of no confidence was moved by Cameron and his Tories. They $#at on me from a great height while in power during the 80's and early 90s with such delightful policies as the poll tax, mass redundancies throughout the public sector (including BBC Transmission), the scrapping of student grants and their replacement with loans. On a wider level, my own local area suffered badly under the Tories as they closed the local coal mines, causing mass unemployment with all that entails. Many of the job losses happened under the premiership of John Major, who has joined in the slagging off of Blair and Brown.

At the same time, Blair and Brown have been no defenders of jobs - many jobs were lost locally when the local Ericsson mobile phones factory closed in 2001, and the government did nothing to help. Civil servants have fared even worse; a few years ago Brown threatened thousands of civil service workers with redundancy. Under the guise of the "war on bureaucracy". (Seems a bit rich for a government which has crap-flooded the legal system with thousands of petty laws since 1997 to talk about a "war on bureaucracy", but that's another story!)

I'd love to see a vote of no confidence in Blair and Brown, they've both sold the Labour Party and its supporters down the river. But the Tories have no need at all to talk, they're just a nuisance and I wish they'd keep out of it.

As for the next Labour leader, I'd love to see John McDonnell win on a left-wing platform. Better still, I'd love to see an end to the Labour-Tory duopoly on power.

Which is why I'm backing the Respect Coalition.