Sir Keir Starmer and, right, Keir Hardie

• MARTIN Plaut highlighted the issues the Labour Party has struggled with since its creation: what kind of socialism should it represent (Letters, 29 July)?

I wasn’t going to respond, he made all his points well, but I just received an email from the Momentum Group, asking me to help them to: “build a socialist fighting fund of our own”, to counter what they see as attempts by other groups – such as Progress and Labour First – using their cash, including some from donors such as Peter Mandelson’s think tank, “to fund their attempts to diminish the influence of grassroots members within the Labour Party”.

Gawd help us! When will these stupid factions take their heads out of their posteriors and look around and see what a disaster life is for at least a third of our people, the result of decades of Tory policies attacking almost every part of the social structures in our country, flogging off whatever they can to whomever will buy it, and they don’t care who! Well, as long as they are friends of some Tory grandee!

Tony Blair’s New Labour failed to change any of the fundamentals of the policies, largely formulated by Margaret Thatcher’s disastrous government in the 1980s. Labour didn’t dare to challenge even the most stupid of her policies, such as taking us into the European Exchange Rate Mechanism at a ludicrously unsustainable rate.

The subsequent slackening of controls in the financial and banking sector led directly to the financial crisis for which we are still paying. Labour didn’t even try to stop the selling off of council houses under the Tory Right-to-Buy scheme, which has seen a third of these homes now owned by private landlords.

A lot of the caution is their fear of how our nasty right-wing press will report such matters, as evidenced by Keir Starmer talking about “common ownership” recently, rather than re-nationalisation, but I suggested “taking back control” as an alternative phrase, and I am (of course!) right: when our basic water and sewerage system is owned by companies with little or no connection with this country, something is seriously wrong.

And Labour should not be afraid of challenging this stupidity. Or rather these stupidities, since our gas, electricity and rail systems are all in exactly the same sort of situation.

The post-war Labour government put up a hell of a battle to create the NHS, opposed by the Tories and most of the medical establishment at the time, and it has become a model institution for the world, despite all the attacks on it in subsequent decades, especially the last one.

Perhaps it’s time for another meeting in Farringdon Street, with someone strong enough to bang all these stupid heads together, or kick some posteriors? Where is Keir Hardie when you need him, or does his namesake Keir Starmer have the power? The people of Britain need it to happen! And soon.

DAVID REED,
NW3