Our new government does indeed have no legitimacy (“Winner-takes-all elections are ‘dividing the UK’”, News), with more than 75% of registered voters not having voted for what is, in effect, another five-year “elected dictatorship”, and with more than five million (Ukip and Green) voters being represented by just two MPs. This is a constitutional outrage.
Labour must introduce PR in its next election manifesto, thus encouraging many minor party supporters to vote tactically for them. PR would mean that never again would we be subjected to an ideological, rightwing, elected dictatorship. But are Labour still too wedded to dinosaur politics to pursue this scenario? Would they sooner have a Tory government than give up the possibility of becoming an elected dictatorship again themselves? Any such disreputable Tory/Labour Faustian pact, driven by power-obsessed self-interest, should attract the opprobrium of all democratic progressive opinion.
Dr Richard House
Stroud
Pesky people ‘who know best’
Chris Leslie makes a lot of sense and whoever wins the leadership election would do well to heed him (“The temptation for the centre left is to step in and take control”, Business). Without quite saying so, he aims his guns at the traditional tendency of the bien pensant left to think it knows best, save people from themselves and interfere, at great cost and frequently with limited impact – though often negative – in matters where they are ill-equipped to do so.
His references to the rental sector and energy markets are prime examples of short-term interference with no consideration to long-term impact. The pointless, in terms of tax raised, 50p tax rate is another. In former administrations, having to pay for licences for small music venues and pavement cafe tables were other examples of valueless meddling. Generally, people want to be left alone, with a good quality infrastructure within which to go about their lives, and a well-judged safety net for the less fortunate. They don’t want those who think they know better, from whichever party, with zero life experience outside Oxbridge and the Westminster bubble.
Leslie hints at getting this. If Labour want to be attractive again, they and their union paymasters should not shout him down.
Mike Noakes
Winchester
Garden bridge is lovely idea
I was shocked at how intemperate some of the comments on the proposed Thames garden bridge were in your paper (Letters). If there are serious reservations about this bridge, surely they deserve to be made in a much more rational and constructive tone. Personal attacks don’t help.
I agree with Simon Jenkins’s recent remarks that “Heatherwick’s creation is a thing of real beauty”. I think it will be a welcome contrast to so many of the ugly and shameful buildings that are now windswept miseries to walk near and a blight to see on London’s skyline. Whether the garden bridge is in the right place is a matter I’ll leave to others.
As is inevitable with a project of this sort the arguments of how this should have been or is being financed, will surely pale when throughout the changing seasons and over the years millions of people can enjoy the magic of strolling quietly, calmly and romantically through Dan Pearson’s garden.
No cars, no cycles, just the sounds and beauty of nature, some fragments of human conversations and the timeless presence of the Thames itself.
Michael Wolff
London
End this unbalanced ballot
Paul Hewitson asks: “Did it not occur to the writer of the editorial ‘Labour needs more voices in the leadership debate’, that candidates for the Labour leadership who could not muster 35 votes from their parliamentary colleagues might not be ‘likely to appeal to the country’ either?” (Letters).
I wonder did it not occur to him that with the parliamentary Labour party being the conformist bunch it is, to require 35 nominations will rule out more radical would-be candidates, resulting in a list comprising a number of peas from the same pod?
Mr Hewitson is right about the “registered party supporters” danger. This was an ill-thought-out rule change that alienates members and should be scrapped.
To leave the PLP in full control of leadership nominations when 35 are needed to qualify is very wrong: “one member one vote” should apply to leadership nominations, as it does in the actual ballot. A pale version of your correspondent’s fears of “some electorally toxic, clapped-out Blairite” could well succeed under the present rules.
Eddie Dougall
Bury St Edmunds
Look who got his ‘rude’ badge
Your reviewer of More Human wrote of “platitudes so banal a Girl Guide leader could repeat them”. This was also highlighted in large type (New Review). Why a Girl Guide leader? Perhaps we should have read of “platitudes so banal a book reviewer could repeat them”?
AG Simpson
Falkirk
