In their excellent articles, Ross McKibbin and Maurice Glasman, (“The red sag,” and “The deplorables fight back,” April) offer ways of assessing Labour’s predicament. McKibbin points to the inadequacy of Jeremy Corbyn as leader and urges the party to get rid of him. Glasman, by implication, would want to retain someone close to old-fashioned working-class instincts (though Corbyn and others embody an Islington elite).
My sympathies are with McKibbin, but he and Glasman share a relative insularity that ignores the decline of democratic socialism elsewhere. What all western peoples have lost is a sense of community, coherence and solidarity which Labour post-1945 embodied. Labour’s revival can only begin when its ideology swings from a managerial, bureaucratic centralism back to localism and pluralism (as once with Keir Hardie’s Independent Labour Party). A good start would be to recapture a sense of British patriotism, rooted in an awareness of our history. Corbyn could try, if he did not appear to hate his own country.
Kenneth O Morgan, Witney
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