Martin Kettle (Are you hoping for a progressive alliance to oust the Tories? Don’t hold your breath, 11 May) is probably right about Labour’s attitude to governing alone after the next election. Given its postwar track record, it should think again. Labour has only won a working majority – over 50.5% of seats – in five of its nine victories. Of the other four, three were very short-lived, and the fourth needed Liberal support to survive. Even after landslide victories in 1945 and 1966, Labour was soon back in opposition. If Keir Starmer wants to be prime minister long enough to change Britain for the better, he should ensure proportional representation is introduced without delay. Otherwise the Conservatives will yet again quickly recoup their tactical voting losses at the following election.
Peter Mendenhall
Nottingham
• Martin Kettle usefully reminds us of the power of political parties – a 20th-century construct characterised by “institutional lag” as well as tribalism. A politics of ideas and innovation is the only kind that will fit us for the challenges of the 21st century, and the parties, as constituted, cannot deliver it. A tribe cannot look beyond its own boundaries because “there be dragons”.
Only an end to party hegemony can deliver the politics that we and the planet need, and only a form of proportional representation can end their current stranglehold. Yet Keir Starmer clings to first past the post because it can deliver power and a “majority” government. I despair – and I doubt I’m alone.
Lyn Dade
Twickenham, London
• I worry that Martin Kettle is bang-on. I share the fear that we are sleepwalking into a long delayed follow-on act in the Punch and Judy show that passes for politics in the UK. The same old rhetoric, the same old bollocks reheated from the 1970s. The gap between this perpetual mummers’ play and the challenges we face, not only to repair the damage done over 13 years but to mitigate the damage to come, is vast. It’s becoming a task for a generation.
We cannot survive another five years of this nonsense, and Starmer has given not the slightest indication that he has an inkling about what is needed. If the anti-Tory alliance doesn’t work and succeed in launching a new platform with PR and sustainability at its heart, we need something far more radical. Enough is enough. I would like to plead with the Guardian to explore and expose this dilemma over the next 12 months. It would be one of its most important campaigns.
Neil Blackshaw
Alnwick, Northumberland
• It is depressing to read that the Labour party “overwhelmingly remains a majoritarian party” since this is essentially a political system which enables a government to claim a democratic mandate for imposing the policies of a minority on the majority. It is odd that an allegedly “progressive” party should support such a system and odder still that it should support the British form of majoritarianism which is systematically biased in favour of its principal – and decidedly regressive – opponents.
Pace John Stuart Mill, wasn’t the Conservative party supposed to be the stupid one?
Jonathan Allum
Amersham, Buckinghamshire
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