Sarah Wollaston was elected MP for Totnes in May 2010 after winning the UK’s first American-style primary election – open to every voter in Totnes – for the Conservative candidacy. Four years later, there has been no movement on getting “real people” elected (“Ukip has risen on the back of broken politics”, leading article).
Labour is entrenched in its old ways. A growing number of politicians on all sides seem to have slid into politics via public relations, short-lived media jobs and thinktanks. Few of them appear to have got their hands dirty working in manufacturing, agriculture, services or not-for-profit work.
This lack of “real” world experience and an informed view of how people live creates a lack of empathy with the electorate. Reinforce this with the culture of parliament that engenders delusions of adequacy and power that inevitably corrupts sensibility. Then add to this lethal cocktail the continuing downward trajectory of the turnout of the electorate and you will end up with politicians pinning the blame on someone else, usually the other party, and when that fails, the electorate.
The malaise and its treatment rests entirely with the politicians to provide a dynamic for positive political reform where it counts – at the ballot box.
Chris Hodgkins
London W13
I share the alienation from Westminster politics of Ukip supporters. Cameron richly deserves his acute discomfort. He has been throwing the “red meat” of reheated Thatcherism at the ultra-rightwing since 2010. This has simply whetted their appetite for more. The Lib Dems, whom I supported repeatedly in my Tory/Lib Dem marginal constituency, have lost all credibility with their duplicity and stupidity in giving the Tories the opportunity, without a mandate, to shrink the state, privatise public services and immiserate the most vulnerable.
This ought to be an open goal for Labour but their leadership is woeful and lack a coherent centre/left populist agenda that would bring potential voters, like myself, back in droves. This agenda requires a clean break with the discredited neoliberal narrative that has deformed Britain since 1979.
It should include the renationalisation of rail, energy and water and an end to being ripped off by the City and corporate capital. Until Labour is led by someone with passion and character, such as Margaret Hodge, Alan Johnson or Andy Burnham, it will continue to drift towards the electoral rocks.
Philip Wood
Kidlington
Oxon
Analyses of the Ukip phenomenon are of value, but a serious probe at Labour’s grassroots yields a more straightforward historic explanation. In the heady and somewhat juvenile early days of New Labour it was often understood, and I have actually heard it said: “We don’t need to bother about the working class, the less well off or sink-estate votes because they’ll have to stick with Labour, they’ve nowhere else to go.”
Unfortunately for self-righteousness, time passes. Loyalties fade as new generations arise. Politicians start to look all the same – and ordinary folk find that there is, after all, somewhere else to go. The politically vigorous in Scotland turned to independence. The ignored in the rest of the UK turn to Ukip. This can be cured, but only by a once-for-all abandonment of the top-down PR-style politics of the last 20 years and a fully-blown democracy of the people themselves, a vigorous, even passionate electorate that includes the sink estates as well as those who travel business class.
Can Ed Miliband do it? Hand on heart, I believe he is the very best man for the job: his background, his intelligence and his heart tell me so.
Ian Flintoff
(former Labour parliamentary candidate and Kensington councillor)
Oxford
