Well said, John Harris (Keir Starmer is threatening to leave our crises unchanged. So what social forces will he unleash?, 16 July). At last a journalist is challenging the Labour/Tory nonsense about spending money on our cash-starved public services being “unaffordable”, because there is “no new funding available”. Of course, when Keir Starmer writes or speaks, the 13 years of unnecessary austerity are “pretty much unmentioned”, as Harris says, as they were the result of political choices which, it seems, the Labour leader is about to replicate.
Starmer’s insistence that what is needed is “reform” is correct, but not of our underfunded education, health and care services, where cash injections are needed immediately, if only to stop the outward flow of essential staff. Where reform is really needed is in the taxation system: the rich and high earners have to pay more; the oft-suggested equalisation of capital gains and income tax has to become a reality; the tax gap of £32bn has to be reduced; all tax reliefs need assessing; and all loopholes, especially those in inheritance tax, have to be closed.
Bernie Evans
Liverpool
• I was deeply disappointed to read John Harris’s piece on Keir Starmer’s Observer article published the day before. Starmer’s talk of “growth … creating wealth, attracting inward investment and kickstarting a spirit of enterprise” is the same political dogma we could have heard anywhere over the last 40 years. Growth? Now Rachel Reeves is rowing back on a green investment fund, leaving in place the economic model that has been destroying the natural world for the last 200 years.
Creating wealth? Huge amounts of wealth have been created, even during Covid, but it’s gone to the same few at the top of the pyramid. Inward investment? We’ve already sold off much of our infrastructure to “investors” – what more can we do? A spirit of enterprise? Plenty of people are involved in devising means to funnel money upwards and retain the status quo.
It’s not easy, I realise, to sell the idea of change to much of the electorate – it can be a worrying prospect. But if politicians have no inkling of a vision of a fairer society, how can we ever start that process?
Hilary Lang
Frome, Somerset
• A Labour leader who, after 13 years of Tory austerity, isn’t prepared to commit to spending more on public services is a bit like a pope who no longer believes in God. Just because so many of us disliked Jeremy Corbyn, it doesn’t mean we want Labour to renege on its promises on Brexit, fair wages, Green reforms and the nationalisation of private monopolies. Keir Starmer’s fiscal conservatism is beginning to look more like political conservatism every day, and, if he cannot find a way of supporting increased public spending after so many years of Tory cuts, many Labour voters will conclude that he isn’t really Labour.
Stephen Porter
London
• The articles by Polly Toynbee (Listen up, critics: first let Labour win power. Then scrutinise its real record, 17 July) and Owen Jones (There’s no point to Labour as a party if it won’t pay to pull children out of poverty, 17 July) look incompatible: either you vote for Keir Starmer’s Labour party or else you oppose it. But socialists whose memories go back further than New Labour might recall Raymond Williams in 1974. Believing both that the Tories must be defeated and that Labour’s socialist credentials were hopelessly compromised, he settled for the slogan “Elect them on Thursday; fight them on Friday.”
Peter Womack
Norwich
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