On Monday the ban on "saviour siblings" was defeated, and research using hybrid embryos can go ahead, today attempts to introduce law requiring a father figure for IVF treatment have been defeated and lastly, the big one which always gets people up in arms, attempts to lower the abortion limit have been defeated. Phew...

I'm pleased to see Gordon Brown and Nick Clegg supporting the current 24 week limit. David Cameron, of course and no doubt like most of the Tories supported cutting the current limit to 22 weeks, and some even lower.

Unsurprisingly people who are indoctrinated into bronze-age mythology led the charge to get the limit cut. Their defeat hopefully will blunt their further attempts to influence public policy going forward.

As I've written before, parliament should be a place for evidence and reason, not a place for mythology.

LABOUR MP John McDonnell demanded that the Brown government make "a choice between democracy or oligarchy" at the weekend.

At Saturday's Hands Off Venezuela national conference in London, he condemned new Labour's ongoing hostility towards Venezuela and pledged to make solidarity with the Bolivarian revolution an issue that "no MP would be allowed to dodge."

Fire Brigades Union general secretary Matt Wrack roused the 200 activists present when he attacked the hypocrisy of the British government in accusing Venezuela of corruption last week.

He recalled the recent privatisation of Ministry of Defence research division QinetiQ, which saw senior managers pocketing some 20,000 per cent profit.

Conference approved five motions, including one on the forthcoming constitutional reform, which condemned international media smear campaigns and "economic sabotage" by capitalist states.

Delegates also blasted the recent "biased and misleading" This World programme on BBC2, presented by journalist John Sweeney, which quoted claims by pressure group Transparency International that Venezuela is the second most corrupt country in the Americas.

More here...

Mr Brown this is a highly inappropriate time to be inviting Thatcher around for a friendly chit chat. There's something very wrong with this Labour government.

An Autumn of Discontent is exactly what we need.

It certainly looks like it, most of the remotely "lefty" people in the cabinet have been moved off, and today Brown has finished appointing his junior ministers, some of which aren't even in the Labour Party, a few examples:

We've got Sir Ara Darzi, health minister. Admiral Sir Alan West, Home Office minister, Lord Stevens advisor for international issues. Lord Malloch Brown, Foreign Office minister for Asia, Africa and the UN. Lord Lester advising constitutional reform.

Best of all Sir Digby Jones, formally of the CBI now trade minister. Labour's Fightback has the scoop on this guy, who is rather well known among the labour movement - for all the wrong reasons.

After a waste-of-time election we've got Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman, both solidly New Labour.

You only need to look at the turn out, half of Labour Party members, and just 8% of affiliated Trade Unionists. I certainly couldn't vote for somebody who didn't nominate John McDonnell.

I'm sick of right-wing politicians talking the socialist talk while busy selling off public services, the deputy leader election really brought some of this out. But as Owen Jones points out, they needed to use left-leaning language in order to get anywhere, thanks to the recent shift leftwards in the unions and the party.

The move leftwards has clearly alarmed the New Labour gang, Brown announcing he'll scrap trade union votes on policy making at the Labour Conference.

For those under any illusions about Brown, John McDonnell recently covered a sticking point at the EU summit.

True to his neo liberal philosophy, the reason Brown demanded Blair go back into the negotiating room and dig his heals in was because he was fearful that the French were undermining the free market. He was angry that Sarkozy of all people was seeking to "dilute" the operation of free competition in the EU market.

On the plus side in a recent poll only 22% of people said David Cameron would make the best Prime Minister. I think from that we have no danger in losing the general election, and I think it is time to start pressing the campaign against New Labour, and the Tory moles inside it, and ultimately for us to reclaim our Party and steer it on a socialist course.

Great just great, the guy is not even in the Prime Minister yet and he's already got people working away to see if privatising Channel 4 is an option for him, from the Torygraph.

Asked if Mr Brown might sell Channel 4 to raise an estimated £1 billion, a Treasury spokesman described the idea as "speculation" but declined to rule it out completely.

[...]

However, she is likely to be moved from her post when Mr Brown becomes Prime Minister.

It is believed that BSkyB and RTL, the owner of Five, would be interested in buying Channel 4 if it were put up for sale.

Great! Murdoch and friends would be interested. Fantastic, we all know how utterly rubbish Sky and Five is. We don't need Channel 4 to become any crapper than it already is, let alone that crap.

Leave Channel 4 alone, stop dumbing down television.

If you want to raise some money, don't spend it all on the £76 billion rip-off called Trident, we do not need nuclear weapons.