I'd have thought all you hotshots could have found more important reasons for choosing where to cast your votes than where candidates got their education.

It strikes me that there have been many more top scientists, doctors, lawyers, and just about every other profession, who were educated at Eton and Oxford, or Harrow and Cambridge, than were products of the "Comprehensive system".

New Labour inherited an all-time low inflation rate, and interest rate, along with a huge fiscal surplus which they managed, in just ten years, to fritter away in futile tinkering around the edges of the various institutions, without ever achieving anything more than the alienation of the front line staff, whom a labour government should be looking after.

They have abdicated any pretence of being the party of the working man.

The direct results of Brown's time as Chancellor, and Prime Minister, were:-

1. The wasting of funds which might have seen us through the recession. True it started in the USA, but outside the USA we were the first in, we went deeper in than anyone else (other than Greece and Eire, who had both been heading for a fall anyway), and we haven't yet come out.

2. The raid on pension funds which saw many low paid working people (including myself) forced to retire on less than half what they paid for.

3. A teaching profession turned into government pen pushers who do a week's work and then spend their evenings and weekends on reams of paperwork.

They have the immortal gall to piss and moan about Lord Ashcroft who is a "Resident Non-Dom", and earns money both in and outside of the UK.

He pays UK tax on all his UK income, and presumably pays tax on the rest in the countries in which he earns the money.

Meanwhile New Labour is a wholly owned subsidiary of the UNITE union, which pays for its campaigns (and what else besides?), and chooses its candidates.

Can anybody deny that this puts New Labour in a position of being vulnerable to undue influence?

I can't see Lord Ashcroft influencing Tory policy in quite the same way.

New Labour are one hundred percent discredited. The Tories under Cameron (who is nothing like Thatcher), are much less so.

Cameron reacted to the expenses scandal instantly and made it clear that Tories who did not immediately make restitution would not be allowed to stand as candidates in 2010.

Brown did neither, and took much longer to decide which of his mob would go, and which would just have their wrists slapped.

And just as an aside, the Moat Cleaning and the fancy Duck House expenses were, it is true, presented to the Fees Office, but were not approved, nor paid, unlike the (New Labour) payments on the non-existent mortgages.

All in all, there is a pattern emerging here, and not to New Labour's credit, or credibility.

Don T.