Initially highly vexed by Barbara Ellen’s piece on why she has left the Labour party (“Since when was moderate a term of abuse?”, Comment), I then tried to rationalise why someone clearly intelligent would ditch their political party of choice so readily. Surely she has been around long enough to know that political parties ebb and flow and morph continuously and rely on their members to not only praise the party when it is in tune with said members’ views and aspirations, but also to stick around and debate when the contrary applies. Ellen castigates Labour and compares Corbyn and his team to “nightmarish fifth-form debaters”, but her decision to leave the party would seem to me akin to a fifth-form debater storming out of the classroom when the debate is not going her way.
Whether Corbyn is electable is irrelevant a few weeks into his success in the recent leadership election. Ellen seems to challenge the validity of the £3 voters who chose JC in their thousands. The leadership election process enabled those of limited financial means to cast their votes alongside the more affluent party members. Since it seems to be the less well-off who are suffering the most at the hands of the Conservative party’s ideological barrage across all walks of life, surely Labour’s less well-off deserved to be part of the decision-making process of electing a new leader.
So instead of “good riddance”, I would ask Barbara Ellen to return to the classroom and rejoin the debate – JC may or may not be electable but healthy debate among true Labour members will at the very least provide stiff opposition and hopefully engage enough of the disillusioned electorate to again put their trust in a party that places honest debate ahead of rhetoric and spin.
David Scarlett
Braintree
Essex
Barbara Ellen is to be congratulated on her excellent article on the state of the Labour party. We (both in our 80s) have voted Labour in every local and national election since we were old enough. We endorse Barbara Ellen’s views; our dilemma is who do we vote for now? Voting Tory is not an option.
Alfred and Margaret Forster
Preston
Unlike Barbara Ellen, I don’t have a public voice and, unlike Robert Webb, I don’t have journalists hanging on my every word. Unlike both of them, however, I have decided that while I think Jeremy Corbyn was and remains the wrong choice of leader for the Labour party I am not going to quit. I will stay to help rebuild the only political party that can challenge Tory hegemony in England and Wales. The SNP is doing that very well here in Scotland.
The stakes could hardly be higher. If Barbara and Robert want to save the NHS and cement the links between health and social care and if they want to roll back the DWP’s assault on the disabled and if they want to put in place economic growth policies such as those routinely outlined by Will Hutton they should rejoin Labour and make it electable once again. Meanwhile, I and thousands like me will just get on and do the heavy lifting required to enable Labour candidates to be elected as local councillors, MPs, MSPs and MEPs.
Derek Mckiernan
Edinburgh
The fallacy that Barbara Ellen and other Corbyn critics succumb to is the notion that any of the other candidates for the leadership of the Labour party would have been capable of winning the next election. They would not.
Instead, they would have continued to adopt the same or similar policies to the Conservatives with a predictable outcome. Far better to have a Corbyn-led Labour party that will advance policies that reflect the views of the majority of the party and will present the electorate with a credible alternative to the Conservatives.
Ronnie Tremlett
Brighton