Letters to the Editor – week ending 1 March 2026

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

Don’t whine – be better and braver: Responses to the Gorton and Denton by-election.

Dear Emma,

Thank you for your excellent summary and analysis of the Gorton and Denton result.

I wanted to pick up on one point with you though. You pointed to the positive campaign that Labour fought, but is that really the case? My impression from the campaign material I saw in hard copy and on social media was that most of our focus was on the reasons not to vote Reform or Green, and we actually said relatively little about the positive reasons to vote Labour.

I believe voters are turned off by this sort of campaigning.  One person I spoke with on the doorstep told me “all you and the Greens do is deliver leaflets saying the other ones are wrong or lying and I don’t know which one of you I should vote for”.

I would very much welcome a renewed focus on Labour communicating our own values, policies and achievements. The result yesterday shows that we won’t win by focusing only on why we’re less undesirable than the other parties.

In my view we have to build much more positive and consistent messaging around why a vote for Labour will improve people’s lives, opportunities, safety, standard of living etc, backed up by simple and real examples of how that will look and feel as opposed to theoretical or abstract missions which don’t adequately explain how they will benefit people.

Yes, we should highlight the fallacies in our opponents’ policies and campaigns too, but that shouldn’t be allowed to overshadow what we stand for ourselves.

Best regards

David Hughes

[Response from Emma: What I meant when referring to positivity was the sense that was coming back from activists of how much they were pulling together and up for the fight. But that’s a reasonable critique about the messaging. Thank you for raising it.]

*****

 “They were too physical. They only played the long ball. They got their goal and then parked the bus. That’s not the right way to play the game and they’ll never win the league playing like that.”

How often do we hear those excuses from the manager of the defeated football team? Often with a bit of extra moaning and whining about the referee?

We can’t change how our opponents set up tactically, their methods and their systems, and it’s pointless to whine about it. What we can do is do better ourselves.

It’s the defeated manager who reacts more honestly – who focuses on his own team’s shortcomings and works out where and how his own team can improve – who will ultimately be the more successful.

In the wake of the Gorton & Denton defeat, that’s what our party needs to do – as Angela Rayner has rightly pointed out. We’ve got to set out our policies, explain clearly why they represent the best way forward for the UK people. Instead of whining about how our opponents campaign, we need to be making proper political arguments against our opponents’ policies and explaining to the public why those policies won’t work.

And yes, we do need to be braver. We need a robust, social-democratic, economic and industrial plan for the UK which puts people – all UK people – first.

Let’s be better at what we do best – being the party of the people – and let our opponents worry and whine about us.

Karl Stewart
Basingstoke CLP member

*****

Sir/Madam,

I keep hearing talk of “unity” after the Gorton and Denton result, but from where many of us stand on the doorstep, there is very little to unite around. I campaigned hard for a Labour landslide on the promise of real change. What we have seen instead feels like continuity dressed up as renewal. As a pensioner, after the energy price shocks and the loss of the Winter Fuel Payment, I am worse off — and so are millions of others who believed Labour when it said things would be different.

The by‑election result wasn’t an accident. It was a warning. Activists have watched our party drift further and further to the right, chasing Reform voters while neglecting the people who put Labour into government in the first place. We should be challenging Reform’s narrative, not echoing it. And we should be winning back hope from the Greens, not leaving them to articulate the ambition and moral clarity that used to be Labour’s hallmark.

On issues like drug policy, the current stance leaves the field wide open for criminal gangs while communities deal with the consequences — from turf wars to the knife crime that devastates families. Pretending the status quo is working is not a serious position. It is avoidance.

If Labour wants to rebuild trust, it needs the courage to confront the structural issues that have been ignored for too long: deprivation, long‑term population planning, and the democratic deficit that allows a minority of voters to dominate our politics. Proportional representation is already Labour policy. If we are serious about preventing the far right from gaining power again, then PR must stop being a footnote and start being a priority.

Many of us could go on. But the point is simple: unity cannot be demanded when the direction of travel leaves so many behind. Real unity comes from honesty, ambition and the willingness to deliver the change people were promised.

Yours very disillusioned 

Paul Hume

*****

Does anyone in Starmer’s team read LabourList or supportive commentators like Paul Mason? How many times do they have they to be told to get their communications working better? To break with the fiscal restrictions and to start investing in the growth of the country.

Reform will damage itself by itself, the Greens will start to divide their support as they move away from their eco roots and start to articulate their NATO and defence strategies, their obsession with Gaza (a worthy cause but it doesn’t build homes or feed kids in the UK) and decriminalisation of drugs (also worthy but not high on the list of the electorate). As for the Tories, no chance, and Your Party?Jjust another distraction.

If the UK wants to remain a democracy of some credibility the Government has to explain to voters what is happening in the world and how the UK Labour Government is addressing local problems within this context.

Changing PM is not the answer because there are no tried and tested better replacements in the offing. Labour MPs have to start seeing themselves as part of a national team. Yes, they are elected to champion their own constituencies but they have a joint responsibility to keep a Labour Government in office.

The alternatives are not going to do any better and in the end the electorate will just bring in worse and worse governments.

Sue Hillman

*****

Your writers suggest Andy Burnham would have been the winning candidate. Imagine if he had lost to Green or Reform. What would the wiseacres have said then? 

Anne Page

Accountability Politics

I have read this article (‘As metro mayors gain power, Labour must tighten political accountability’ with interest.

An initial thought is that I can remember when the creation of a mayoral system was being developed and discussed within the Labour Party.

Key considerations acknowledged the benefits of strong and visible leadership provided by an identifiable person in the form of a directly elected mayor.

However, the checks and balances provided within the system needed to be reviewed too. These required strengthening to justify a mayoral model.

A key feature of this was to state clearly that the Scrutiny function should have ‘parity of esteem’.

Furthermore, there should be a separation of powers between the executive and scrutiny functions.

In local government the separation of powers has been blurred. An example of this is the inclusion of cabinet members on Planning Committees. More hybrid functions have been added.

Increasingly, there has been a dilution of power between Scrutiny and Executive. The requirements to respect non-executive functions can be undermined by lack of resources, for example.

This can lead to a more authoritarian approach over time.

Developments such as local assemblies and other measures for public participation are subjected to budget constraints and cuts. This can inadvertently further concentrate power.

In the piece there is a reference to the current reporting mechanism for mayors in the rule book.

The NEC has over the years has reviewed and issued guidance on this and made rule changes.

An audit of those changes may be beneficial now. It may reveal how we got to the weaker system and suggest how we strengthen proper scrutiny and accountability in the Party and more widely? 

Kind regards,

Alan Hall

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