Spencer Livermore and his “modernising” friends are unlikely to get very far if they continue to delude themselves that the accession of Jeremy Corbyn is a victory for a long since vanquished “hard left” (Labour’s right has no future as a bitter sect, 28 September). Corbyn’s youthful supporters will have never heard of the hard left, let alone supported it. And many older folk were simply voting for things like decency in social security, the reinvention of progressive taxation and the end of NHS privatisation. The simple fact is that, bar Trident, most of Corbyn’s policy platform, for example on public ownership, derives straight from the Wilson and Callaghan governments, hardly hotbeds of the left. The last thing the Labour party needs is renewed factionalism, a point which Corbyn appears to have grasped. Livermore should do likewise and get behind the new leadership.
Robin Wendt
Chester
• Spencer Livermore says of New Labour “that only the ends, not the means, were sacred”. Is that the nub of the New Labour problem, that the ends it sought did not include, for example, community cohesion, a sense of shared ownership, a sense of collective endeavour? These are means to other ends, but are worthwhile ends in themselves – a view shared, I imagine, by the overwhelming bulk of Corbyn supporters. As for the nonsense about being defeated by the “hard left”, if there were 250,000 hard-left activists in this country we would have had the revolution years ago.
Richard Seabrook
London
• Rachel Reeves tells those on the right wing of the Labour party to go on the doorstep to say the leadership does not represent the party (Chaos at grassroots meeting as Corbyn’s critics launch their fightback, 28 September). Leave aside the truth being twisted; anyone listening to this, right or left, would see part of a party fighting against the rest, and could well decide not to vote for it. Clearly, this is Reeves’s desire. I feel only contempt for her behaviour.
Mike Bieber
London
• As a long-standing Labour party member who voted for Andy Burnham as leader, I was dismayed to read that Richard Angell, director of Progress, got a loud cheer by saying “we need to rally against the Trots”. If a Corbyn supporter had said “we need to rally against the pink Tories” it would have been quite rightly condemned, and no doubt put on the front page as evidence of the start of a witch-hunt. Comments like these are beneath contempt.
Cllr Peter Rankin
Leader, Preston city council
• Martin Kettle (Labour has created a new situation. It may not survive, 25 September) quotes the ludicrous assertion from Labour MP Jon Cruddas that “We lost because we were anti-austerity. The Tories won because of austerity.” In England and Wales Labour won 14 more seats in 2015 than it did in 2010; in Scotland it won 40 fewer. The SNP won overwhelmingly in Scotland because the electorate there saw it as the only party to stand against austerity. In England voters like me saw no such big-party alternative for an anti-austerity vote. We did not see Labour as anti-austerity. At last we have hope that they might become so. Both Jon Cruddas and Martin Kettle seem to be wilfully disregarding this new hope for many English voters.
Helen Boothroyd
Morecambe, Lancashire
• Tony Blair’s former political secretary John McTernan calls the centrist MPs who nevertheless nominated Jeremy Corbyn for leader “morons”. Margaret Beckett says her decision to support Corbyn’s nomination was “one of the biggest political mistakes I have ever made” (The story of an earthquake, 25 September). Really? We now know that 59 % of those voting gave their support to Corbyn. Even among full members (excluding £3 supporters and trade union affiliates) he got as many votes as the other three candidates put together. How can it be “moronic” or a massive “mistake” to enable the clear view of the membership a chance to be expressed? That’s called democracy.
Jonathan Rosenhead
London
• The claim that “Jeremy Corbyn’s only apparent beef with the Chinese Communist party is that its embrace of ‘market philosophy’ has been bad for workers’ health and safety” (Rafael Behr, 23 September) will seem risible to anyone who has followed Corbyn’s career. As “moderate liberals” were kowtowing to Beijing in the 1990s, it was Corbyn who stood shoulder to shoulder with Tibetans, whose homeland, annexed over half a century ago by China, is now has the miserable distinction of being the world’s largest colony. The liberal interventionists who never tire of puffing their chests in the direction of the Middle East’s tinpot tyrannies have somehow contrived to airbrush the suffering of Tibetans as they have gone about deepening lucrative business ties with China. Oddly, Behr doesn’t mention Tibet even once in an article that is all about liberal discomfort with Chinese authoritarianism. Tibetan activists in London know that Corbyn is the most steadfast friend to the exiled victims of the Chinese Communist party – and the most trenchant critic of an authoritarian regime that counts among its friends and lackeys liberal western politicians who not so long ago waged a war to export democracy to Iraq.
Kapil Komireddi
Oxford
