“What is it that the left is not hearing?” Julian Coman asks (Labour’s lost voters clamour for belonging – but will the party answer them?, 3 May). He refers to Labour’s “city and university town redoubts”, but fails to ask what differentiates them from the “red wall”.
Anyone familiar with northern cities will know Labour’s strongest base in them is in traditional working-class communities. The important question is, what makes them different?
There are no easy answers for Labour in rebuilding its base. Flag waving is not one. The tougher challenge is to be there every day, supporting the most vulnerable, as Labour councillors and members have done across the country, during the pandemic. On that basis, we need to create a vision that can give people hope. Engaging in culture wars is not an answer. Service and providing solutions is.
Steve Munby
Labour councillor, Liverpool
• Julian Coman is right in arguing that Labour’s lost voters must be listened to. But they need to be listened to and, crucially, understood. Only then can their needs be clearly defined and acted upon. Take the strong bonds still deep in the psyche of northern post-industrial England, but overlaid with suffering. Who from Labour is really listening to and understanding the roles millions of women are forced to fill, the true heartache and family deprivations of poverty, and the depression of unemployed men from heavy industry and mining, who mourn the loss of supporting comradeship at work?
These are deep crevasses down which millions have fallen, but neither the Tories nor Labour have yet understood what action needs to be taken to recreate a renewed sense of belonging. The broken empty slogans, the flags and nostalgia peddled by the Tories, can’t.
Anna Ford
London
• The reason why Labour is struggling is quite obvious. The one thing that drives many English people to go to the polls is the jingoistic appeal of a party that desperately seeks to “make Britain great again”. Scottish voters have rumbled the vainglory of this, and I guess voters in Northern Ireland and Wales will soon do the same. But the not unusual historical alliance of a chauvinistic English working class and elitist upper class, together with an outmoded electoral system, leaves little room for a new cosmopolitan, pluralistic and outward-looking constituency to gain a political foothold.
Dr David Clark
Bakewell, Derbyshire
• Labour lost the “red wall” over Brexit. It is Brexit that continues to rubbish every naive notion about reconnecting the broken bits of Britain, as what is happening in Northern Ireland shows. You don’t regain a sense of belonging by voting to leave the larger continent we are so manifestly a part of, or by fuelling the dynamics of nationalist independence. You don’t regain a sense of belonging by empowering a ruthless political force run by the elite for the elite, whose greatest populist successes are achieved through xenophobia, chauvinism and snobbery.
While there is a memory of “mutual bonds and feelings of togetherness that were engendered by ... industrial work”, it wasn’t Labour that wrecked industry in this country. You won’t restore a sense of belonging by repeatedly voting for a party that continues to privatise and flog off the public sector, the very fabric of communitarian life.
Ben Entwistle
Crewe, Cheshire
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