When Frances Ryan asks “What is the point of Labour?” she is articulating the thoughts of many voters who have waited years for a sea change in the government and now fear that a Labour one under Keir Starmer will simply offer us Tory-lite (What’s the point of Starmer’s Labour if it won’t stand up for poor, sick or disabled people?, 12 March). She rightly identifies that Labour’s policy agenda seems to be shaped by a small group of rightwing newspapers, resulting in Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves parading around dressed in the sackcloth and ashes of fiscal responsibility.
There is a fundamental flaw and inherent dishonesty in adopting this economic straitjacket while propounding the notion of growing the economy as the route to recovery and the rebuilding of public services. Starmer needs to be honest with the electorate that growing the economy will only improve the wealth and wellbeing of us all if it is accompanied by a redistributive tax regime, where those who prosper the most pay the most and additional tax revenues are invested in public services and infrastructure.
Peter Riddle
Wirksworth, Derbyshire
• As Frances Ryan points out in her excellent critique of Labour’s economic policies, Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer repeatedly claim that they want to make Britain “attractive to business”. Sadly it seems that the UK is already far too attractive to those with wealth.
Examples of this are not hard to find: a lack of oversight on overseas tax havens, allowing widespread avoidance of much-needed state funding; weakened trade unions and a lack of legislation on collective bargaining; fast-track access to government contracts for those with the right contacts; the ability of foreign investors to buy and keep empty swathes of much‑needed homes, without significant financial penalty; the ability to pay huge dividends from the profits of privatised utilities and public services, with little requirement to run them efficiently; and the ability to control access to large swathes of the countryside. I could go on.
As Ryan concludes, perhaps a new Labour government’s efforts should rightly be aimed at making the UK much more attractive to the increasing number of people on low wages, with substandard or no housing, poor health and little prospect of improving their lives and those of their children.
Carl Gardner
London
• It is no use Labour brandishing its moral compass for the electorate if it then loses the election. Hence the caution being shown by it. The only compass worth having is the one that directs Labour to government. Only if it is in office can it begin to help all those dispossessed, displaced and disheartened. An incoming Labour government will face a daunting challenge to redress the inequalities promoted over the past 13 years. It cannot afford to further alienate those in need by promising quick remedies that it will not be able to deliver.
Martyn Taylor
London
• There needs be a key addition to Frances Ryan’s catalogue of Conservative policies that a Labour government will keep in place. When the Conservatives brought in the two-child limit to deny benefits to third and subsequent children in a family, they broke the golden rule that, however much one hit parents and other adults, one did not harm children who were in no way responsible for their poverty.
It is beyond belief that the Labour party should want to retain this damaging policy.
Michael Meadowcroft
Leeds
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