Congratulations to Jeremy Corbyn on his magnificent victory in Labour’s leadership battle. Contrary to what his detractors are saying it shows 100% that Jeremy can win elections, if he’s given the chance.
Now the media and Labour’s right will maintain that the new membership are silly young people who can’t be trusted and have nothing to do with the wider electorate.
But they have everything to do with the wider electorate. Any time that the membership had grown so quickly, Labour has been on course to win the general election.
It’s the party’s right that unnecessarily threw the spanner in the works with this contrived coup and leadership challenge. Before that, Labour was catching up with the Tories in the polls. What damage they’ve done. If Labour MPs can say nothing positive about Jeremy’s re-election then I beg them to at least not stand in the way and to give him a chance.
Mark Holt
Liverpool
• Your editorial (24 September) seeks “tolerance and compromise” within the Labour party, yet during this past year there has been no evidence of either. So, after 41 years membership of the party, including as a branch chair, council candidate and campaigner, I have resigned. This is due to both the hopelessly incompetent leadership and the direction of the party. I can no longer associate with a narrow sect locked into the mid 20th century, preoccupied by words not deeds, and insulated by those with a facile ideology. The Labour party under this leadership has become intolerant of dissent, insouciant of the role of opposition, utterly disrespectful of elected Labour parliamentarians and councillors and completely disregards the need to win power across the country. Its supporters indulge in the politics of adolescence and of nostalgic gesturing, and demonstrate a wholly ineffective policy grasp for current times. I hope that in the near future there will be a social democratic party of competence and the credibility to govern this country.
Dr Clive Sellick
Norwich
• Your editorial makes the standard case that Labour needs to win “support in the centre”. But where is this “centre”? In the same issue Matthew Engel chronicles the huge rise in London property prices, a massive redistribution of wealth in favour of the rich as against the majority of non-property owners, the young and the poor, who were dissatisfied enough to vote for Brexit. Labour could unite and win under the slogan “The rich should pay their share”, on a programme starting with a reform of council tax to make it fully progressive, and examining ways of taxing land and financial assets more effectively – plus a determined crackdown on tax havens and avoidance (“making companies pay their share”). This would not only save our public services and fund council housing – it would divert resources from financial assets and positional goods into consumer demand, hence productive investment, productivity and growth.
Alan Bailey
London
• I have never been a member of a political party. The only pressure group I am part of is the Musicians’ Union. This more out of sentiment than fee or work protection. I did once attended a local Labour party constituency meeting but nearly fell asleep. However, I have always voted, and always voted Labour. This, despite my horror of Labour’s complicity in the Iraq war and its refinement of “Tina” (there is no alternatve), in which the excesses of a rampant capitalist economy were ameliorated only by parking people surplus to the new order on benefits (which the Tories were then only too happy to dismantle).
I voted for the least worst option. This is the dilemma of most voters. It is tragic and dishonest of Labour MPs to claim they represent those who cast votes their way. How the will of the people is determined has perplexed political thinkers. And many voters are ceasing to vote at all. However, disengagement from the process – as we saw at the last election – means leaving power in the hands of elite groups with the persuasive power money can buy.
The Labour party is now the largest political party in Europe. If the debate for the soul of the party and its policies is not conducted therein, from where should it come? The current call from some sitting Labour MPs to claim their mandate arises from an unnamed, unknown group of people who placed an X against their name is arrogant, disingenuous and deeply undemocratic.
Edwin Prevost
Harlow, Essex
• As a historian of the Labour party, I was dismayed but not surprised to hear so many calls for unity in the aftermath of Jeremy Corbyn’s re-election – even from his opponents among Labour MPs, commentators and academics. But unity is not a good in itself and to call for it is little more than tribalism. Moderates should not unite with people who back Britain’s enemies abroad and who pursue a style of politics at home that is little more than malice in the guise of virtue. To fixate on unity is a reflection of the same cultural problems that have landed Labour in its current mess: a historical, pathological, and increasingly pathetic fixation with betrayal.
Country should come before party; but, for some, being Labour is such a part of their identity that they are willing to go along with almost anything to sustain it. In pondering what to do next, they might reflect on the great figures from Labour history who put their country first: Attlee, Bevin, Callaghan – and, yes, Ramsay MacDonald.
Dr Robert Crowcroft
University of Edinburgh
• It’s remarkable that opponents of Jeremy Corbyn still do not seem to understand the sources of his appeal. Let me suggest two reasons. The first is that many voting for him have experienced, through employment in the public sector, the gradual creep of privatisation and the imposition of forms of management illiterate in the understanding of contexts such as education or health care.
Second, considerable sections of the work force (the “left behind”) have seen their jobs stripped of benefits and security and – through an over-emphasis on academic credentialism – stripped of any respect. The fantasy of social mobility through competition and selective forms of education consistently marginalises this group.
All these changes have been legitimated as modernisation, while challenges to them are written off as old Labour. There is nothing – as many people voting for Corbyn have said loudly – modern about greater inequality, or old-fashioned about principles of fairness and equality. Many people take the view that neoliberal economics can never deliver anything except to the rich and powerful, and that a politics of minor adjustments is not a sufficient challenge.
Mary Evans
Patrixbourne, Kent
• So the great leader now wants unity in the Labour party. Just checking, is this the same Jermyn Corbyn who voted 428 times against Labour governments?
Don Macdonald
London
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