Your editorial (21 May) is spot on. As a rank and file member I feel totally impotent and remote from the process. The members’ voices should be heard. After all, it’s our party. I am, therefore, asking all members of the Labour party to write to the chair of the NEC, demanding that this farcical leadership contest is halted; that either Harriet Harman or Alan Johnson leads us for a respectable period of reflection; and then to amend the current rules, which are more like a presidential primary than a mature democratic process. Will anybody join me?
Helen Hughes
Ludlow, Shropshire
• After Labour’s bad election defeat in 1983, Michael Foot immediately announced his resignation as party leader. As a junior member of his front bench team, I wrote asking him to delay his departure until the party had had a chance to debate – at all levels, from grassroots to NEC – its principles and policies so that those campaigning for the leadership would know what the party wanted from a new leader. Michael was unmoved but my letter resulted in Robin Cook approaching me to ask if I was acting on behalf of other MPs. I told him I was not. The leadership campaign went ahead quickly, with party discussion solely about the merits and views of the candidates. Today seems an apt illustration of the cynical adage: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Eric Deakins
London
Hooray for your leader on the Labour Party leadership process. • I am a party member baffled by this rush into a process which has become a beauty contest between a dwindling number of right wing MPs, before we have had a chance to get to know them well enough to judge, let alone decide the basic principles we want to see a new leader fight for. It’s all the wrong way round. Just as the party tamely accepted the Tory narrative that the financial crash had been because Labour overspent, now it is also tamely accepting the narrative that the election was a disaster because the party was too left wing. Let us slow down, leave Harriet Harman in place for at least six months as interim leader, and take time to think through what we want and what our principles are, and only then set about finding the best person to express those principles.
Adam Leys
London
