4 hours ago
4
I wonder how many members still clinging on to the Labour party winced at Gaby Hinsliff’s article (Ed Miliband’s stock is rising because he’s a rare commodity in Labour these days: a thinker, 27 March). Like everyone else, she recognises that Labour has become an intellectual vacuum, with its only clear features being unpleasant policies designed to exploit the far right’s prejudices.
But the electorate is ahead here. They know that resurrecting the once admirable but now compromised Ed Miliband will do nothing to heal the existential injury in the party. Most people no longer hark back to the halcyon days of New Labour’s claim to build a better society. They now recognise it as a swindle, with its toxic components of privatisation, private finance initiatives, excesses in the private financial sector and, of course, Iraq.
Labour’s heavily curated view of its history is undermined by the data. The party lost votes steadily in every election between 1997 and 2010. This trend was only reversed in 2017, when a highly popular manifesto won Labour’s highest percentage of the vote this century against huge internal and external opposition. The reversion to traditional Labour in 2024 led to a drop of 3,000,000 votes from this high-water mark. When presented with radical but fair policies, the electorate is willing to vote for them – both in 2017 and recently in Gorton and Denton. In contrast, the worthy but timid agenda of Miliband in 2015 was roundly rejected.
The radical mantle has passed to the Greens, and unless Labour recognises the mistakes it made in its purging of the left, it is doomed. Of course, it cannot do this, and its supporters who have ignored the real electoral evidence are doomed to perpetual bewilderment.
Hugh Williams
Birmingham
Both Andy Beckett (How tacking centre left will help Labour win the next election, 22 March) and Zoe Williams (12 March) recently argued that if Labour is to stand a chance of achieving a second term in office, it needs to move to the left of politics and form alliances with other left-leaning parties. Labour must accept that the era of a dominant two-party parliamentary hegemony has ended and, as the latest analysis of voting patterns confirms, forthcoming elections will be characterised by five-party politics.
A disillusioned electorate is now searching for any alternative to Labour and the Conservatives that offers them a promise that things can only get better. The existential predicament for Keir Starmer’s Labour party is whether or not it recognises this. If Labour chooses to cling to a parochial belief in the return of the status quo, it risks joining the Conservative party in ceasing to remain a significant governing force in UK politics.
Peter Riddle
Wirksworth, Derbyshire
For once in recent weeks, the Guardian published a realistic message (from Martin Datta, Letters, 23 March) about the way Keir Starmer is handling the UK response to Donald Trump’s illegal and reckless “adventure” in the Middle East. No one on the opposition benches, nor indeed in his own party, could have dealt with this crisis in such a calm and measured way.
That goes equally for the way that he has led the Labour government domestically to start to put right the economic and social wreckage that Tory governments have caused to this country in more than a decade.
Harry Bower
Rotherham, South Yorkshire
