Jeremy Corbyn has won: now Labour’s left must do more than posture
Version 0 of 1. I am not and never have been a member of the Labour party so wouldn’t presume to offer a prescription for its current malaise of hyperactive navel-gazing. But Gary Younge’s diagnosis is spot on (Now Labour’s two sides can start to bridge the great divide, 26 September). Opposition is an honourable estate and not just a fallow preparation for being acceptable at the next election. It is a time to argue a party’s distinctive case, with or against the tide of public opinion. It requires engagement with movements that are not tied to parliamentary arithmetic, such as the current ones about the iniquities of housing provision, against the privatisation of the NHS and many more. The government is currently motivated by matters of Tory party management, be that the demonisation of the disadvantaged and dispossessed, the Brexit fiasco or the grammar schools diversion. The need for a tribune to voice the principled alternatives is urgent regardless of immediate electoral calculation.Nik WoodLondon • Gary Younge states that the Labour right needs to “present a credible alternative candidate or programme” to replace Jeremy Corbyn. I have only contempt for the Labour right, but I recognise that it must be difficult for it to formulate a programmatic alternative, given the paucity of concrete policy generated by Corbyn and his shadow cabinet in their first year. The Labour left was so ill prepared and lacking in ambition when it put up Corbyn as a leadership candidate that it now has no idea what to do with the positions it has captured. The reality is that many people outside the party experience Labour as a landlord or a debt collector, in its local authority role, rather than as a “progressive” political party. It is this as much as anything that has alienated working-class people from Labour. If Labour under Corbyn is to serve any useful purpose it has to stop pretending that Momentum is anything other than a simulacrum of a social movement, and begin to deal with real ways in which Labour councils can change their roles, from being enforcement officers, threatening eviction or removal of property, to instead setting no-cuts budgets, and refusing to put up rents/send in bailiffs/carry out evictions. Anything else is just posturing. If Labour in local office cannot, under Corbyn, be a shield for working-class communities, then the Labour left will prove itself as useless to its core support as its Blairite opponents have been.Nick MossLondon • May I refer Don Macdonald (Letters, 26 September) to Ronan Bennett’s article “You want leadership? …” (Opinion, 17 September) in which he provides evidence that Corbyn has been on the right side of history for 30 years. I suspect that a good proportion of the 172 who signed the motion against Corbyn in June are on the wrong side of history.Kathleen O’NeillHayling Island, Hampshire • Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com |