The new Labour leader: Give Jeremy Corbyn a chance. He’s the best hope we’ve got | the big issue

http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2015/sep/20/the-big-issue-labour-leadership-jeremy-corbyn

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Who on the left can argue with Jeremy Corbyn’s desire to end austerity and tackle inequality (“Britain can’t cut its way to prosperity. We have to build it”, Comment)? Who does not want the economy to work for everyone and Labour to give voice to the 99%? The trouble is, as Andrew Rawnsley reminds us on the same page, in May, more than 11 million voted for something different.

Never mind the 99%, the task is to persuade 51% that gross inequality is bad for everybody and that Labour has some answers.

The moderates who held sway until recently, as Rawnsley again reminds us, clearly failed in that task. They were incapable of giving Ed Miliband their full support in confronting what he called predatory capitalism, and by neglect they allowed a lot of poor people to vote for more poverty.

They now complain that they have lost the leadership as well as the general election. Serves them right, but what have the rest of us done to deserve another five years, minimum, of Tory government?

Is Jeremy Corbyn the right person to “reach out to the whole of Britain”? I doubt it, if only because of the people around him, but we can live in hope. What else can we do?John FilbyAshoverDerbyshire

Your editorial (“Unless Corbyn moves beyond protest politics, he has no hope of gaining power”, Comment) suffered from a common misunderstanding. You write about the reasons why “voters deserted Labour for the Conservatives in 2015”. But it’s not at all clear that people who voted Labour in 2010 defected to the Tories in large numbers in 2015, when the Labour vote in England went up by 3.6% compared with the Tories’ rise of just 1.4%.

In taking this view you seem to reflect the widespread but erroneous assumption among commentators that the Tories received a ringing endorsement from the voters this year.

They did not: they secured the votes of less than one in four of the total electorate. In the days before five-year fixed-term parliaments their wafer-thin majority would have made it unlikely they would survive the full term.

The roots of Labour’s defeat surely lie elsewhere. Large numbers of voters opted for parties committed to a more radical agenda than Labour offered – Ukip, the Greens and the SNP – while the Lib Dems’ explicitly centrist pitch was roundly rejected.Professor Ron GlatterHemel HempsteadHerts

Toby Helm says that Jeremy Corbyn’s acceptance speech lacked the polish of his predecessors. Thank goodness!

Your editorial was disappointing. You said very little about the fact that you and most other media got the Labour election wrong in terms of the outcome or the huge reinvigoration it has produced in the Labour party. A little humility would have been more interesting, and analysis of your own failures. You rehash the old arguments that a left-leaning Labour will never get elected. You state that Jeremy espouses old policies that have failed in the past and nobody is interested in hearing him.

Many people have not heard these arguments before from someone who is so sensible, honest and clear about what he thinks. That is why so many young people are interested.

How sad that you can’t see beyond the old order to look further at the upheaval in politics in Europe and apply some lessons to the UK. You need to get real.Jenny SingletonLondon N22

Toby Helm says that Jeremy Corbyn’s acceptance speech lacked the polish of his predecessors (“The day that Labour was hit by a political earthquake”, News). Thank goodness! We have had enough of polish and varnish. What we need is a bit of grit.Nichola GregoryBristol