While Councillor Warren Morgan may feel obliged to attack the Tories for cutting public services at the council budget meeting (Letters, March 3), I'd like to remind him of his own party's failure to stand up for ordinary people.

After all, it was his Labour administration that wasted nearly £2 million of the city's budget trying to privatise our much-needed council housing against the wishes of 70 per cent of tenants. It was also his Labour administration who handed over the site behind Downs Infant School to a private waste contractor against massive local opposition, all because Labour's "friends" wanted it. Labour are simply the Tories with red ties these days.

Unless Coun Morgan and his Labour cronies stop putting the interests of their big business sponsors before the interests of the ordinary people that have elected them, there will be many like myself and the millions of others who have abandoned Labour, who will start to build a new party, a new voice for the working class.

  • Peter Knight, Brighton and Hove branch of the Socialist Party Montpelier Street Brighton