NOW the election has tipped us out of the frying pan of New Labour’s Tory policies into the fire of the Tory policies of some other parliamentary arrangement I want to comment on that election. The media coverage was dire but some shadows of the real issues facing ordinary people could be glimpsed through the fog. Tory Kenneth Clarke said that if we didn’t get a Tory government the financial markets would lose confidence. Decoded: The next government must make multimillionaire financial speculators confident that they can continue making the vast profits through speculation that they made before that speculation caused a recession. Already financiers’ confidence has been restored by massive state bail-outs to the extent they now demand the massive cuts Clarke and Cameron support, while sharing out bail-out money in huge bonuses. The only comment from the media, mostly owned by another subset of multimillionaires, was agreement that there must be massive cuts. Just to prove this is a democracy, the other parties agreed, although Labour said “not just yet”. So now we know whose interest the government will be working for when they slash public spending and attack pensions to pay the fat cats in a Greece style attack on the people. PETER SMITH Woodside Avenue Swindon