Letters | 6 July 2017

The wrong choice

Sir: Sebastian Vella’s new-found interest in politics is to be commended, but he has made the wrong choice (‘Letter from a Corbynista’, 1 July). He praises Jeremy Corbyn for being ‘politically consistent and transparent’ but believes that Corbyn and John McDonnell do not ‘aspire to a one-party socialism or a communist state’. If you check their record, that is exactly what Corbyn and McDonnell do aspire to. He also trusts the democrats in Labour to rein in its leaders. Corbyn and McDonnell’s record over the decades includes extra-parliamentary activities such as demonstrations and marches, support for strikes, and even (as Charles Moore reminded us) for terrorist bombers. It is surely likely that if they were to gain executive power, they would be tempted to use it to make parliamentary opposition an irrelevance. Perhaps Sebastian could check out what happened in Russia in 1917 and in Germany in 1933 before trusting the likes of Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall to save us from the consequences of his voting decision. Richard North Hayling Island, Hants

Corbyn-mania

Sir: I read James Bartholomew’s article (‘To a young Corbynista’, 24 June) and the replies (especially Alex Scholes’s excellent letter) with great interest. Like many of your readers, I assume, I know far too many young relatives and friends who are being seduced by Corbyn-mania. As Alex Scholes said, they ‘want what we had’, which is fair enough. What they don’t realise is why we had what we had, viz: a Conservative government which, from 1979, rolled back the state and set the economy on a growth track that lasted until 2007. The challenge for us all is to make this argument again and again, so that enough of them are sufficiently convinced that they don’t have to suffer five or more years of a genuinely socialist government that would prove our point in the worst possible way.