As a veteran of the SDP split from Labour, Polly Toynbee speaks with great authority when she dismisses suggestions that a new rightwing breakaway from Labour might be electorally viable (Labour people are optimists, but this time I see no hope, 22 December).
Labour’s best chance lies in the deep shifts in public understanding, not limited to continental Europe, that the systemic crisis of a financialised monopoly capitalism – buttressed by a coercive state and prescriptive supra-state institutions like the EU, IMF and World Bank – cannot be reformed. In Britain this understanding runs through electoral blocs so that many of the people who express their antipathy to the EU through voting Ukip or even Tory share many assumptions with those most enthused by Labour’s new willingness to present real alternatives.
In marginal constituencies as well as solid Labour seats – on privatisation, railways and public transport, the NHS, Trident renewal, foreign interventionist wars and tax avoidance by big business and the rich – there is a rich seam of votes to be mined made up of the millions of voters lost by New Labour. Plus the many alienated by contemporary Conservatives and unprincipled Lib Dems. Labour under Corbyn is moving the centre leftwards. Just as perceptive Tories feared.
Nick Wright
Faversham, Kent
• Not for the first time in her life, Polly Toynbee sees “no hope” for Labour. Jeremy Corbyn, she has determined, can never be prime minister but the party is stuck with him, so there it is. We’re all doomed.
Corbyn has been tested electorally three times this year. At the general election – or “massacre” as Toynbee terms a ballot that saw Labour’s vote increase by more than a million in England and Wales – he nearly doubled his Islington majority. In the leadership ballot, he came from nowhere to take 60% of the poll. And, unpredicted by any commentator, his first byelection test saw an increase in Labour’s vote share. These are actual votes by living people, not speculations by professional soothsayers. But obviously they count for nothing.
W Stephen Gilbert
Author, Jeremy Corbyn – Accidental Hero
• I fear Polly Toynbee is right. Our constituency meeting voted last spring to support Corbyn and was gainsaid by very few, who vainly pointed out that most of the country had voted against a left-of-centre Labour party and that we could not help anyone from the opposition benches.
I had come round to supporting Ed Miliband in the faintest hope, rather than belief, that he would grow into the job if elected prime minister. Only a loyalty to my MP and to my immediate colleagues in my branch keeps me in the party – the constituency is fast becoming a Momentum-Tendency-type enclave. The voices of such as Margaret Beckett, Alan Johnson and Hilary Benn urging us to try and make it work go unheard in the party locally and nationally.
Corbyn is the wrong leader – he cannot and will not deliver a Labour victory. There is only one thing he has in common with Father Christmas. Unfortunately his beard is too thin and straggly to believe in.
Anne Ayres
Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire
• Polly Toynbee states that “appalling legislation passes without the public knowing, for lack of an effective Labour voice”. The shadow cabinet has been less than effective because the priority of too many has been to undermine the democratically elected leader at every step of the way, rather than opposing the government. In spite of this, the campaigns against providing services to the Saudi Arabian prison system and tax credits were successful.
During the New Labour years the party had become unaccustomed to political dialogue. Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader has been a breath of fresh air. At the last election only 36.9% voted Conservative and 24.8% voted for parties other than Labour, Tory or Lib Dem. The results of the elections in Spain were that the centre-left PSOE had its worst result since Franco, with Podemos making gains on the left. If PSOE is to form a government it will have to work with others.
I do not share Toynbee’s pessimism, because a majority do not want this government. Its gerrymandering of election boundaries and the new electoral register confirms the necessity of a rainbow alliance of all those committed to constitutional and electoral reform. If in due course the party chooses to split, then so be it, but until that time the factions within it, together with those outside Labour who oppose the Tories, should form a pact based on the principles of the respective parties with an agreement to reverse the democratic deficit.
David Melvin
Ashton under Lyne
• No wonder Polly Toynbee is downhearted. She assumes that the only alternative to a Tory government at Westminster is a majority Labour government and that we are stuck with our current voting system. Historically, first-past-the-post voting has survived attempts to replace it – most recently in the AV referendum of 2011 – not so much because of its virtues as because the parties could never agree on a remedy for its faults. With the emergence of multi-party politics, the system’s virtues – decisive results and stable government – are greatly outweighed by its faults: disproportional representation and declining legitimacy.
It is, therefore, in Labour’s interests to propose an all-party convention to consider alternatives to first-past-the-post, with a view to reaching a consensus on a replacement to be put to the voters at the next election. If the Tories refuse to take part, they risk becoming isolated, for all the other parties, including the SNP, have good reason to attend. There is, of course, no guarantee that a consensus would emerge. But if, as seems likely, the Tories were alone in defending the status quo, the other parties could pledge to include a commitment to electoral reform in their respective manifestos, thereby enabling either an anti-Tory coalition or a minority Labour government to introduce the necessary legislation in the next parliament.
David Purdy
Stirling
• Polly Toynbee writes of the appalling legislation being passed by the Tories without the public knowing, because of the lack of an effective Labour voice. The reason the public are often unaware of such legislation is that any Labour voice raised in protest is not reported in any real detail in the 75% of the press controlled by the right. Before you write off Corbyn and the left, give him more than 100 days.
Charles Cronin
London
• Could we please have a break from the various articles explaining why Labour will never win the 2020 election while Jeremy Corbyn is in charge? My only previously published letter appeared in the Football Pink in November 1989, when I opined that United would never win anything while Ferguson was in charge!
Don Richards
Manchester
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