Getting increasingly worried about Alan Johnson

One of my hopes when Ed Miliband won the Labour leadership contest was that we'd have less of the Blairite policy stance which had helped drop Labour from 40% of the vote in the 2001 election to 29% in 2010.

But instead, we get Alan Johnson on the BBC Politics show saying he doesn't think the 50p tax rate should be permanent.

Well excuse me, but isn't this a direct contradiction of the policy Ed won the Labour leadership campaign on? What is this, the Liberal Democrats?

Alan seems to have got on top of the brief reasonably quickly but Ed needs to bring him into line pretty quickly - or replace him with someone else who's more comfortable with Ed's policy.

Otherwise, what on earth was the point of getting Ed elected leader in the first place?

Given that polling consistently shows that the 50p income tax rate is very popular, it seems crazy that Johnson - or anyone else in the party - wants to drop it.

But that's the way the Blairite faction in the Labour party works. No-one's happy unless they're pushing a policy which is an exact approximation of the Tories. (or nowadays, the ConDems).

This is the kind of crap that resulted in me joining the Green Party. And I'll be extremely vocal in calling it out whenever I see it.

Because Labour can easily win the next election IMHO, but only if it starts offering a genuine alternative. And I'm pretty sure Ed knows that. So why the hell isn't he putting his foot down on this?