Letters to the Editor – week ending 30th November 2025

Read what people have been writing to our editor about this week. Find out how to share your own views here.

Leading questions (again)

We’ve had 19 different leaders of our party, but only four of them have won general election majorities – Clement Atlee, Harold Wilson, Tony Blair and Keir Starmer.

 What Labour has never done, is to remove a leader, while Prime Minister, during his first term of elected office. So, in reply to yesterday’s Labour List email asking me which of four potential alternative Prime Ministers I prefer, I ask: Do we really want our own summer of 2022?

Ignoring the crisis facing the UK, the arrogant Tories took three months off from the job of government to indulge in lengthy internal leadership debate…and then imposed Liz Truss on the nation, followed soon after by Rishi Sunak.

Where are the Tories now?

Underneath all the media noise, our Labour government has made a good start – on health, education and housing, minimum wage, workers’ rights, renters’ rights, more free school meals and breakfast clubs, private schools paying fair taxes, more apprenticeships, nationalising railways and freezing fares.

A lot done – a lot still to do.

Keep the focus on the people, not ourselves. We’re Labour, we’re not the Tories.

Karl Stewart

*****

Hi Emma,

Fully agree that support for the Labour Party is a moral crusade, but the thing about moral values are that they are broad based, not about individual leaders or policies. There are many ways of lifting children out of poverty, an aim with which most voters would agree, without crusading for a specific policy or making detailed promises which may have to be changed to get Parliamentary, or electoral, support.

And a crusade gets nowhere if we are not in Government – we need to get a majority of the electorate to vote for us next time as well or it could all be turned back, and worse, by a following right-wing Government. We must take the electorate with us.

And what about the Labour MP’s acceptance speeches after their election victories, pledging to represent all their constituents not just those who voted for them? Doubly hollow if those MPs now insult people who voted for them but may be considering voting for Reform, as well as those who didn’t vote for them, by calling them ‘cruel to children’ if they don’t agree with lifting the two child benefit cap, and ‘racist’ if they have any misgivings about immigration.

I support a party whose values are caring and sharing; freedom and respect for individuals; well paid work for all abilities; a Party which has a track record of establishing the NHS, State Pensions, sick pay, universal free education, social care, good quality affordable housing, the minimum wage, etc. etc. – irrespective of who the current leaders are or what their specific policies may be. The best thing about our current leadership is that they are prepared to change policies in the light of changing circumstances even if they have made it difficult for themselves with too specific promises.

Leaving the Party means you have no say in who the leaders are or what their policies may be. Joining or voting for another left wing party just splits the vote, lets in a right wing party and all the good crusading work will be undone.

Regards 

Colin Bryant
Wakefield

PFI don’t believe it…

The issue of the return to using private finance to restore and build the NHS estate is too important for John Hutton to simply assert: ‘This has worked in the past. Programmes like NHS LIFT built 350 health centres …and provided value for money’. 

Hutton discloses being chair of the Chair of the Association of Infrastructure Investors in Public Private Partnerships (AIIP). My own experience, as a retired NHS paediatrician contradicts his assertion. The NHS-funded and owned Kaleidoscope Children’s Centre in Lewisham avoided LIFT (a later form of PFI) and has therefore saved £1 million a year since 2006 in LIFT repayments. It is cheaper per square metre than all the LIFT schemes built in that period. 

PFI always costs the public purse far more in the long term. PFI hospitals in the 2000s cost £12.4bn to build. The contract repayments (though also often including facilities management costs) total £80.8bn. PFI companies’ profits have averaged 9.4% and add up to many billions of pounds. That is why PFI was strongly criticised by the Treasury Select Committee in 2011 and the Office for Budget Responsibility described “off-balance sheet vehicles like PFI” as an example of fiscal illusion (July 2017). 

Labour should avoid PPP and use government borrowing to invest in the future of the NHS.

Tony O’Sullivan
(Retired NHS consultant paediatrician)
Co-chair Keep Our NHS Public

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