The right of a local Labour party to pass a motion of no confidence in its MP can hardly be seriously challenged. It has happened very occasionally, and sometimes there has been a long-standing difference with the MP (Letters, 10 September).
However, in the present circumstances there is bound to be concern that such motions are being more widely orchestrated. There is, in some places at least, a wish for the MP to swear a kind of loyalty oath to the present leadership.
As someone who has been involved in it, in half the time the party has been in existence, I have always felt its strength and longevity was being a pretty broad church. It has certainly seen off many more left groups, as well as those in the 1980s who broke away to form the SDP.
All party leaders, from Attlee to Blair and Brown, had their internal critics, and the idea of an oath of loyalty to any of them would have been quickly dismissed as derisory.
With Tory MPs at each other’s throats now, it would be unfortunate if intolerance and sectarianism were to prevail in Labour’s ranks. Those who urgently need a change of government deserve better than that.
David Winnick
London
• Steve Richards rightly notes that Tony Benn had all the qualities it takes to be a PM except the ability under the then existing rules to get elected as leader of the Labour party (Boris Johnson: the worst prime minister we’ll never have, 12 September).
There is a wider question, and one which exercised Benn. In recent decades we have moved to a system of prime ministerial government rather than genuine collective cabinet decision-making. That places an emphasis on the role of the prime minister that not even the most able find it easy to meet.
Keith Flett
London
• Owen Jones (A new party would just be a Blairite tribute act, discredited from the start, 7 September) usefully expanded his points made earlier on Radio 4’s Today programme, when Tony Blair claimed to work in Attlee’s tradition. The Attlee government created the NHS, built over a million homes, established pensions, benefits and secondary education for all, implemented Bretton Woods policies to control and redistribute wealth, and helped to create UN and European agreements on human rights and peace.
Instead of reversing Thatcher-Major policies, the Blair-Brown governments extended them: in the privatising and PFIs that are destroying the NHS; in the loss of social housing, a fair benefits system and free higher education; in competition between schools instead of inclusive education for all; in deregulating the banks, and in the great growth of inequality, prisons, the arms trade and war-making instead of peace-making.
If Tony Blair and his supporters really think they follow Attlee, then clearly they can see no rational place for further left Corbyn policies. They should realise that Corbyn’s supporters want a government that really continues Attlee’s policies. They also want public debate, such as on the selection of MPs, to be about policies, instead of gossip about personalities.
Prof Priscilla Alderson
London
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