Jonathan Freedland believes that the centre-left needs a charismatic leader, citing Clinton, Blair and Obama as evidence that such a leader could be a winner (It will take an extraordinary Labour leader to beat the right, Journal, 21 December). The trouble is, they weren’t centre-left. They were neoliberals who perpetuated, and sometimes drove forward, the project for privatisation, deindustrialisation and adventurist, regime-change wars. The charge I’ve heard repeatedly from disillusioned ex-voters over the past decade or so, that politicians are “all the same”, can be traced back to the failure of these charismatic leaders to live up to their hype.
I’ve often been told that it is no good having the right policies if you can’t persuade people to vote for them and put you into government. My response is that it’s worse to parrot glib phrases in order to get into government, then let people down.
Shaun Pye
Leeds
• The main reason for the electoral failures of the left, in this or previous elections and in this country or other liberal democracies, is disunity. Rightwing parties often feed off and avoid undermining each other. Not so those on the left, which always seem to be at war with one another, behaving like cults that see themselves as keepers of the one true faith and all others as mortal enemies instead of natural allies.
Rightwing parties of every hue tend to cooperate, and often find common cause, as happened when the Brexit party stood down its candidate wherever the Conservatives had a majority. Had Labour, Lib Dems, SNP, Plaid Cymru and Greens found an effective way to cooperate, the left might be celebrating now. Or, as Sue Hawthorne wrote in the same issue (Letters, 21 December), had Tony Blair jettisoned the first-past-the-post system after New Labour’s 2001 decisive victory, we would be in a very different place now. But, like every other party leader who had ever won a big majority, he assumed that power was his for ever and saw no reason to share it with anyone else, especially not those perceived enemies on the left.
Sam Babiker
Bristol
• There’s a well-documented phenomenon called the backfire effect, whereby people faced with evidence that a cherished belief is wrong sometimes reject the evidence and double down, becoming even more fervent believers. Both Andy Beckett – “The left rarely gets to run the party and so is all the more castigated when it fails to capitalise on the opportunity” (Journal, 20 December) – and Jonathan Freedland seem to believe there is some sort of cosmic fair play at work whereby left and right have an alternating entitlement to govern.
Drawing comfort from the fact that one can find a metric by which the recent Labour loss was slightly less disastrous than 1983, or saying that success for the left requires a leader with exceptional charisma, involves wilfully hiding from the painful possibility that the electorate’s preference lies to the right. Personally, I liked Labour’s policies at the last election, but it sure looks to me like not enough other people did.
Bill Britten
London
• Jonathan Freedland mars his stimulating piece on the electoral weakness of the left by claiming that “in the postwar tally of US presidents, Republicans outnumber Democrats”. They do, seven to six – but only if you count Gerald Ford. Ford succeeded Nixon when Nixon resigned, but lost when he stood for election. So it is six-all in presidents who won an election – hardly evidence of rightwing dominance.
David Lipsey
Labour, House of Lords
• There is a two-word response to Labour needing a leader of extraordinary charisma: John Smith. Where would the country and Labour now be if he had lived and led Labour to the 1997 victory?
Nick Cook
Newcastle upon Tyne
• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com
• Read more Guardian letters – click here to visit gu.com/letters
• Do you have a photo you’d like to share with Guardian readers? Click here to upload it and we’ll publish the best submissions in the letters spread of our print edition
