It’s always refreshing to hear from Jack Monroe (I didn’t leave the Labour party. It left me, 20 March), but in this case the unpleasant backlash she has obviously suffered has tempted her into incontinent language: “‘Vote Green and you’ll get Tories’ they shriek at me.” They may “shriek”, but it is an unfortunate fact that given our skewed electoral system, it is perfectly true that voting Green could allow the Tories to sneak back into government.
Those of us who, like Jack Monroe, yearn for old-fashioned Labour policies and a fairer society, need to think calmly about this rather than swapping heated accusations. There is a very good argument for postponing support for the Greens till after the election, then going all out in the expectation that the Greens will replace Labour in the long term. There is also a contrary argument for switching to the Greens immediately, which is that the medium- and long-term dangers of climate change (which Labour shows no sign of dealing with effectively) are so important that we can’t afford not to build up the Green vote in the mean time, even if it risks the catastrophe of another Tory administration.
Personally I’m firmly impaled on this dilemma and genuinely can’t decide what to do. In the end I’ll probably do what I’ve always done (and doubtless thousands of people like me do), which is vote in whatever way will keep the Tories out.
Jeremy Cushing
Exeter
• It would be wrong to lambast Jack Monroe as a traitor for joining the Greens, but right to underline the potential consequences of her approach. Before the last election, I said (Letters, 3 June 2009) that I trembled for the future of the residents of the Newcastle council ward I have represented since 1967 should a Tory government be elected. My fears have proved to have been amply justified. Hundreds of households have been afflicted by the bedroom tax, hundreds more by the regressive changes to council tax support. The food bank in the adjoining ward, with a branch in mine, run by the Trussell Trust, is the largest in the country.
And the whole community suffers from the devastating cuts in council services as a consequence of the government’s deliberate decision to make local government bear the largest reductions in funding. Newcastle city council is doing its utmost to protect people from more draconian cuts than even Thatcher imposed, and it is paying the living wage.
There will be difficult choices to be made if Labour wins the election but, if it doesn’t, because voters fall for the Tories’ myth-making or because people like Jack vote Green because “the only vote you should care about is your own”, the future for my constituents will remain irredeemably bleak.
Jeremy Beecham
Labour, House of Lords
• Since the Labour party was infiltrated by neoliberalism, Jack Monroe’s has been a common story. From the outset, far from simply being a vote-winning machine, the neoliberal capture of the party was wilfully unrepresentative and with very damaging results. At the 1992 general election, Labour’s popular vote under Kinnock was 11.5 million. 1997 was a peak of an anti-Tory backlash. The Conservatives lost 4 million votes, with New Labour picking up half of them and hitting a popular vote of 13.5 million. The prevailing anti-Tory sensibility pushed Labour membership above 400,000. However, once policies started to hit the party’s core demographics and the nature of the New Labour neoliberal project became apparent, voter turnout collapsed. In 2001, New Labour lost 3 million votes – that’s 2 million it had gained from disillusionment with the Tories plus a further 1 million of its core turnout. Its support was now just 10.5 million. In every general election since, the party haemorrhaged a further million votes until finally in 2010 it plummeted to 8.6 million. Over this period the party lost two thirds of its 1997 membership peak but in 2014 eventually managed to stabilise at 190,000. Significantly the earliest signs of electoral collapse occurred in working-class communities where the Iraq war factor was smallest.
Instead of criticising Jack Monroe, the question should be why didn’t neoliberals start their own grassroots movement instead of stealing and killing off the Labour party that was once democratically representative?
Gavin Lewis
Manchester
• Jack Monroe is right to identify dissatisfaction felt by some on the left. Many of us south of the border look at the SNP and are jealous of its successes. Similarly we look at the Greens and see them promoting an agenda well to the left of the Labour party. There is a case for a major review with a new left being synthesised from the Nationalists, Greens, Labour and the Lib Dems. Most people in the country do not favour a Tory world.
Bryan Ferriman
Kenilworth, Warwickshire
• “I didn’t leave the Labour party. It left me.” Can we have the T-shirt, please?
Pete Bibby
Sheffield
