Andy Beckett’s article on how leftwing views have been systematically marginalised, even demonised, in the Labour party accords with my own experience (We exclude the Labour left from British politics at our peril, 11 March). As a student in the mid-1950s I absorbed socialist ideas but rejected joining the Communist party and was held back from joining the Labour party by the antagonism between the Gaitskellites and the Bevanites. However, I eventually joined at the time of the Suez crisis and remember how enthusiastic I was when reading the housing policy document. If that had been adhered to in the periods of Labour government, all housing today would have been either publicly or owner-occupier owned and changes in the use of land would not be making millionaires of its owners, nor pricing new housing beyond the incomes of young people.
What happened instead was Anthony Crosland’s book, The Future of Socialism, arguing that the capitalist system had been contained and a balance achieved between public and private enterprise: there was no longer any need to regulate and limit the activities of the market. I thought this naive at the time: John Stuart Mill said the price of liberty was eternal vigilance and I thought this applied equally to the containment of capitalism. However, casting doubt on this view was seen as doctrinaire Marxism, and equated with lack of concern about individual freedom even after 1989.
Another issue that cast me into a minority after I joined was my belief in negotiation in place of war and the abolition of nuclear arms. I was distressed about Bevan’s volte-face in 1957. I was by then devoting all my spare time to the Labour party, and had become a constituency officer and a council candidate (I lost in the 1959 elections by a tiny majority). But after Gaitskell’s declaration that he would fight and fight again against nuclear disarmament, I resigned.
I joined again in the early 1990s, but after Blair succeeded John Smith I again felt that my principles and concerns were not being given serious consideration. Nevertheless I gave much time and support to the local party until the Iraq war, when I resigned. I have since rejoined, although I remain critical of the lack of resistance to neoliberal market-economy policies. Many of my views accord with those espoused over the years by Jeremy Corbyn, but I have never been associated with the so-called Trotskyites, nor with undemocratic behaviour.
There must be many other members like me – young and old – and it is time that we were listened to.
Margaret Morris
London
• Andy Beckett is right to conclude that it is perilous to exclude the British left from politics. Its ideas have had a positive impact upon the country, particularly through the postwar settlement of 1945, much of which still endures today.
The last Labour election manifesto in 2017 was largely pragmatic left in content, and mainstream social democratic by European standards, showing Jeremy Corbyn’s astuteness in formulating policy that secured 41% support from the electorate.
However, his handling of the parliamentary Labour party leaves a lot be desired because of his lack of inclusivity and bears comparison with previous leaders. Tony Blair, for instance, appointed members of the far-left Campaign group of Labour MPs, of which Corbyn was a member, to frontbench and ministerial positions, including Michael Meacher, Gavin Strang and Tony Banks, despite the group being small in number, with about 30 MPs out of a total PLP of 418 in 1997. The current group has 21 MPs, 10% of the PLP, of which Corbyn has appointed Diane Abbott, Rebecca Long-Bailey and John McDonnell to senior frontbench postions.
Yet he has failed to reach out to nearly half of the PLP who do not share his far-left politics, leaving Ed Miliband and Yvette Cooper among others out in the cold despite their relative youth and substantial political and ministerial experience.
Despite his popular support within the party as a whole , the recent breakaway of Labour MPs to form the Independent Group suggests that Jeremy Corbyn ignores the mainstream left and centre within the PLP at his peril and needs to broaden the appeal of the party to the wider electorate.
Steve Flatley
York
• Andy Beckett is right to defend the left. But he overstates his case. Labour under Jeremy Corbyn is historically centrist. Read the party’s 1964 manifesto – of the “progressive” Harold Wilson. Apart from extending nationalisation and building the public sector, it promised both a prices and an incomes policy, an extension of workers’ rights, an end to private education, nuclear disarmament, an interventionist industrial policy and widened internationalisation. More than that, it sought the cultural change we can only dream of: “The morality of money and property is a dead and deadening morality.”
More radical still, and of deep interest to the destitute, disabled people, Windrushers and all, is this from the closing statement: “we attach so much importance to humanising the whole administration of the state”. Hardly “far” left – but much to the left of Labour today. Even so, it was reasonable, sensible, appropriate then and appropriate now. If only Corbyn were that confidently to the left.
Prof Saville Kushner
Ormskirk, Lancashire
• I’m 80, and I felt as though I’d been waiting for Labour’s last manifesto all my adult life. And now we have Rebecca Long-Bailey’s pamphlet The Green Transformation, detailing how Labour would change the economy by greening it. It could be as important as the Beveridge report was in 1942.
Martin Pask
Grimsby, Lincolnshire
• Andy Beckett, while focusing on Labour politics, draws attention to the importance of the liminal in social and political systems more widely. It is not only the far left but the far right of the Conservative party that we ignore at our peril. With the far – or not so far – left and right critiquing the centre ground, the debate now is almost entirely about left versus right. In debates, be they about Brexit or the role of local authorities or the creeping privatisation of the NHS, it is important that the voice of the “moderate” centre should cease to be so moderate and make itself heard.
Roland Metcalf
Manchester
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