Letters: Is Labour’s problem Corbyn or Blairite grandees?

Even if your assessment of Corbyn’s Labour Party is accurate (“Don’t shoot me if I say Corbyn’s Labour really isn’t working”, Letter from the Editor, 23 January) have you considered one possible reason for this state of affairs?

There are many factors, but the refusal of the Blairite grandees and lesser disciples to accept the legitimacy of Corbyn’s leadership, their vicious and unremitting attacks on him and his policies, has fuelled the constant media denigration.

Like countless others during the Blair regime I bit my tongue and campaigned for Labour, not lauding Blair, but not publicly cursing him. If the current malcontents are truly desirous of a Labour success in elections at all levels, they would renounce personal venom and refrain from flooding the news media with anti-Corbyn rhetoric.

Or perhaps as Mr Tony has stated, they also would prefer to see a Cameron government rather than one under Corbyn.

It has to be the easiest of tasks for our gallant scribes to see their names in print at the head of a column dismissive of Corbyn.

Eddie Dougall

Walsham le Willows, Suffolk

I admit I am an optimist and probably an idealist, but Jeremy Corbyn is the only high-profile politician who offers me a glimpse of something I like the look of.

I want a politician who has steadfast principles, rather than pop-up populist policies. I want someone who says “This is who I am,” not “I will be whoever you want me to be”. In Tony Benn’s political dichotomy, I want a signpost, not a weathercock.

Jeremy Corbyn is offering a seismic shift from Oxbridge PPE work experience to leadership guided by ethics, empathy and understanding. It will take time to build a new political consciousness. This campaign has only just begun. The cake is still in the mixing bowl and you are trying to test it with a knife to see if it is baked yet.

Gordon Watt

Reading

Jeremy Corbyn is the embodiment of the little boy in “The Emperor’s New Clothes”: about Trident, bombing Syria, and the rest, he is pointing out that the Emperor is not wearing any clothes. That is why other politicos and the media hate him so much; because they have bought into the con, praising the Emperor’s wonderful garments, for many years.

That is why many of us love him, and look forward to voting for him in 2020.

Labour MPs should get over themselves and pull behind him. When they keep pointing out the subtle beauty of the fabric, they just continue to make fools of themselves. It’s not quite too late for them to be forgiven their past mistakes.

Henrietta Cubitt

Cambridge

I’m sure Amol Rajan’s comments are all true. However, let’s face it, Labour has almost no chance of winning the next election regardless of who is the leader. As long as we have our current undemocratic electoral system we will have a Conservative government until the brainwashed electorate gets thoroughly sick of it. Given the continual drip-feed of anti-Labour comments by the Tory press, I’m surprised Labour gets the votes it does!

Jeremy Corbyn seems to be a decent and honourable man, at least by the standards of Westminster, and if he manages to move the middle ground leftwards, back towards the centre, then he will get my vote and I hope the vote of most decent people.

Peter Johnson

Eaton Socon, Cambridgeshire

Do Labour’s new membership and the parliamentary party really agree, as Amol Rajan asserts, that “Tories are scum”?

And if so, are Conservatives “scum” because they want to get people off benefits and into work, cut the deficit, reduce strikes, help businesses to create more jobs, let taxpayers keep more of their own money, bomb Isis, reduce low-skilled immigration, encourage home ownership, turn failing schools into academies, slash red tape, or increase competition and consumer choice?

I can’t find anything scummy in any of this.

Keith Gilmour

Glasgow

It is only right that Jeremy Hunt should apologise for his mistakes in causing the appalling death of William Mead (“Family of dead baby let down by NHS in ‘worst possible way’, says Hunt”, 27 January).

He is responsible for setting up and encouraging all the inadequacies now existing in our NHS: the shortage of doctors and nurses; the host of various and expensive agency nurses and locum doctors who only have very short-term interest in the patients in their care; the secondary and impersonal NHS 111 system with untrained operatives; the management of the permanent lack of beds which is a needless and time-consuming exercise; the lack of one-doctor-one-patient relationships which causes so many serious medical mistakes; an increasingly overburdened A&E, partly due to a larger population and more senior citizens.

All of these are under-funded.

When did Jeremy Hunt have a seven-year specific training for his job, and when did he last have 12-hour shifts with the need to be ready to make life-and-death decisions every minute of his working day?

John Curtis

Fareham, Hampshire

As an American living in the UK, I can surely share Matthew Norman’s concern over the increasingly viable Presidential campaign of the vile Donald J Trump (27 January). However, Mr Norman’s decision to challenge Trump’s execrable racism and just a bit further on to make a retrograde slur about supposed incestuous leanings of people living in Appalachia was both in very poor taste and hypocritical.

Dr Martha Vail

Edinburgh

As usual, Matthew Norman is spot on politically when he says of Donald Trump’s tergiversations: “The one thing no one seeks from a messiah is consistency”.

In so doing Matthew Norman demonstrates that there is still hope for Jeremy Corbyn’s new-look Labour Party cum People’s Protest Party.

Paul Wilder

London SE11

Justin Moyer’s “The kids are far right” (19 January) nicely described the exercise in self delusion of the Donald Trump-supporting USA Freedom Kids, exemplified in their call for “freedom and liberty everywhere”.

Is that the same sense of freedom and liberty which Trump was invoking when he said that he would “strongly consider” shutting down mosques in the US? As Saba Ahmed, the founder of the Republican Muslim Coalition, pointed out when bravely appearing on Fox News, freedom of religion is an American constitutional right.

Jeremy Redman

London SE6

On Monday night a vote in the House of Lords requiring Iain Duncan Smith to report annually on the health and wellbeing of children was lost, 110 for and 184 against. It was lost because Labour peers abstained while Conservatives voted against. Five bishops supported the amendment moved by the crossbenchers Lord Ramsbotham and Baroness Meacher.

Among the policies that damage health the most are the benefit sanctions. They were invented by New Labour, the screws were turned by the Coalition and they are now mercilessly imposed in increasing numbers by the present government.

As a result, the Fawcett Society has reported, particular groups of women (including single mothers, women facing sexual and domestic violence, and women who have difficulties with English) are exceptionally vulnerable to sanctions through no fault of their own. This is affecting women’s safety, their mental and physical health, and the health and wellbeing of their children.

The benefit sanction is a “slow release” punishment that goes on inflicting pain long after the “treatment” is over. Council tax and rent arrears cannot be paid while a one-month or three-month sanction has stopped income. Debts pile up, their enforcement continues during the sanction; they have to be paid when the sanction ends out of low pay or diminishing benefit incomes.

The devastating impact on the health and wellbeing of men, women and children when debts are enforced by powerful government departments against the low, or non-existent, incomes of vulnerable and powerless households has been brushed under the noble carpets of Government and Labour peers.

The Rev Paul Nicolson

Taxpayers Against Poverty

London N17

In view of Henry Worsley’s unhappy demise (“Explorer’s fundraising page collects £200,000”, 27 January) it was with some relief that I greeted those women in a pink rowing boat who did make the last 30 miles.

Godfrey H Holmes

Withernsea, East Riding of Yorkshire