Labour has left its loyal supporters disillusioned | Letters

Readers take stock of the party’s missteps in government and Keir Starmer’s leadership I wonder how many members still clinging on to the Labour party winced at Gaby Hinsliff’s article (Ed Miliband’s stock is rising because he’s a rare commodity in Labour these days: a thinker, 27 March). Like everyone else, she recognises that Labour has become an intellectual vacuum, with its only clear features being unpleasant policies designed to exploit the far right’s prejudices. But the electorate is ahead here. They know that resurrecting the once admirable but now compromised Ed Miliband will do nothing to heal the existential injury in the party. Most people no longer hark back to the halcyon days of New Labour’s claim to build a better society. They now recognise it as a swindle, with its toxic components of privatisation, private finance initiatives, excesses in the private financial sector and, of course, Iraq. Labour’s heavily curated view of its history is undermined by the data. The party lost votes steadily in every election between 1997 and 2010. This trend was only reversed in 2017, when a highly popular manifesto won Labour’s highest percentage of the vote this century against