Andy Beckett is right to say that “the meaning of Conservatism is up for grabs” (Thatcherite conservatism is on its last legs. I’ve had a disturbing glimpse of what might replace it, 3 November). Although I would never vote for it, we need a decent party of the centre-right in the UK, and the present Conservative party is not it. We need a party that stands for fiscal prudence, challenges the utopian ideas of us on the left, and values traditions and culture.
However, we shall not get such a party until all those who supported Brexit, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss have left politics, and their successors have ceased to worship Margaret Thatcher, deregulation, privatisation and market forces, and recovered the party of Rab Butler and Harold Macmillan.
They should not see politics as simply the advancement of corporate interests with the aim of spending as little on public services as they think they can get away with. They could also point to the great advantages of being a member of the EU and repudiate Brexit as a dream. Then they might be worth listening to.
Stephen Barber
Witney, Oxfordshire
• Andy Beckett rightly argues that the right has noticed that things can’t go on as they are. Thatcherite free market capitalism doesn’t work in a period of increasing climate crisis. Solutions are varied, but the ideas of the far and fascist right are clearly getting a hearing, something that can clearly be observed in the Tory party.
An issue he doesn’t touch on is what the response of moderate social democracy is to this. It sometimes seems that it’s being dragged along with the political lurch to the right. Starmerism, meanwhile, appears to be focusing on changing as little as possible. Even the Thatcherites know that won’t work.
Keith Flett
London
• I hope Andy Beckett is correct in asserting that the Conservatives are heading for opposition, “possibly for a long time”, and that “a Tory implosion at the next general election is becoming likely”. I wish I shared his confidence. To me, now feels nothing like 1964 or 1997. For various reasons, voters are not flocking to Labour.
John Nicholson
Bury, Greater Manchester
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