This welcome movement, challenging the old, stifling, paralysed party system, could and should be the trickle through the dam that immediately becomes a great and refreshing flood (Seven MPs quit Labour in protest over Corbyn’s leadership, theguardian.com, 18 February). I hope that hundreds of MPs from all parties will resign the whip, throw off the party yokes and announce themselves to be standing as independent representatives, with well-informed free votes on all issues. Ministers can be appointed and sacked by MPs’ votes. This could be the major reform that 21st-century citizens seek.
My wife and I are remainers. Our suicidal choices today are vote Corbyn and leave, vote May and leave, or vote anon and wait a decade. Our choices on most vital issues are gagged by the same straitjacket. I hope these seven brave and bold rebels inspire the other 643 elected representatives to take back control, win back sovereignty, earn their substantial salaries, and think for themselves. Dare we suppose that free MPs might even consult their constituents; and vote online in the electronic society?
Noel Hodson
Oxford
• MPs who were elected on a party ticket and then resign from that party should face a byelection. They may flatter themselves that the votes were cast for them as individuals, but most successful campaigns depend on the hard work of the constituency activists who promote the party message by delivering leaflets and knocking on doors. The enormous increase in membership which followed the election of Jeremy Corbyn has provided the manpower to get many of these politicians elected. If the seven are so keen to continue to represent their constituencies then they should allow the electorate to decide if they still wish to be represented by them.
Karen Barratt
Winchester
• The country is facing a crisis, and a “moderate” group of Labour MPs choose to put their own interests before those of the country. Fine. But to be told I belong to an institutionally racist party – not fine.
I brought up two black children in the 1980s. I know what racism is. I would not belong to an institutionally racist party and do not think I do. Perhaps Luciana Berger should consider the language she uses before she insults members of the party she has chosen to leave.
Patricia Brewerton
London
• Membership of Labour has increased fivefold under Jeremy Corbyn. Even if only the same tiny fraction of members have ever been antisemitic, it’s to be expected that the absolute number of antisemitic incidents will have risen correspondingly. One way of not having antisemitism in a political party is the Conservative way of not having any party members.
Nicholas Humphrey
Great Shelford, Cambridgeshire
• Chris Leslie shows contempt for the Labour membership and the wider electorate in trying to justify his resignation. He says the party has been “hijacked by the machine politics of the hard left”. My dictionary defines hijacking as an “unlawful seizure”. Jeremy Corbyn has twice been overwhelmingly elected by the Labour membership, and in 2017 led the party to its highest share of the vote since 2001. Like the SDP, all Leslie and his fellow conspirators are likely to achieve is the return of another Tory government.
Declan O’Neill
Oldham
• Will the pro-Brexit Labour MPs condemning the seven who have left now show their loyalty to their MP colleagues, the party leadership and most rank and file members by voting in unity against Mrs May’s deal, with its guaranteed damage to the UK economy and job losses? Or will they go into the same lobby as Brexit Tories to prop up a pro-austerity, anti-immigrant rightwing prime minister?
Denis MacShane
London
• Is it just me who is reminded of communist Russia? Labour’s loyalty pledges (McDonnell: Labour split could bring Tory decade, 18 February) were foreshadowed by Lenin’s ban on factions in 1921. Are we not allowed to express our own opinions any more, but rather chorus the general consensus of “the people” who have decided, unequivocally it seems, for Brexit? What are the other 48% then: non-entities, “former people”, the incorrigible bourgeoisie? The antisemitic persecution of Luciana Berger reflects the fastidious denunciation of the Jewish Trotsky. And has Theresa May, like Lenin, invented her own higher form of democracy where returning the vote to the masses is a “gross betrayal” of the same? Is Corbyn, like Stalin, so self-seeking and tyrannical that the views of his party are essentially moot? Most importantly, who will lead the de-May/Brexit/Corbyn-isation, and when?
Natasha Loke
Wymondham, Norfolk
• John McDonnell’s recollection of the early 1980s is flawed. You report that he told Andrew Marr that the creation of the SDP in 1981 “basically installed Mrs Thatcher in power for that decade”. If there had been an election before April 1982, the result would have been a hung parliament. What gave Thatcher her 11 years in office was victory in the Falklands. It didn’t help Labour that it was led by the hard left and had a suicidal manifesto at the 1983 election. McDonnell, elected in Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide, may recall that Labour spent the next 14 years languishing in opposition, until it was purged of kamikaze policies – and the hard left.
Charles Foster
Chalfont St Peter, Buckinghamshire
