Keir Starmer’s leadership has alienated Labour voters | Letters
Readers respond to Owen Jones’s summing up of Starmer’s stint as prime minister
Owen Jones’s article is spot-on and provides an important corrective to the hand-wringing nonsense written by other media commentators (Look at Keir Starmer’s tenure as prime minister. This is no ‘decent man’ who got unlucky, 23 June). However, there is one point on which I disagree. Owen says Starmer believed in little other than his own advancement, but it seems to me that he was bent on making Labour permanently unelectable.
Whatever Jeremy Corbyn’s failings were as a leader (and there were several), his political agenda was extremely popular, at least when a hostile media bothered to report it. He very nearly won the 2017 election, reaping 40% of the vote, compared with Theresa May’s 42.3%, while Starmer got just 33.7% in his “landslide” victory. For the first time since the 70s, Corbyn gave people hope that a mainstream party could provide an electorally viable leftwing alternative to the neoliberal consensus. This could not be allowed.
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