Letters to the Editor – week ending 19 July 2026

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

Policy asks

Further to Andrew Parkes article on breaking down barriers I would suggest that universities are already doing what he doesn’t suggest, yet should suggest. That is to run apprenticeship degrees. The University of Aston has done that for many years and others are catching up quickly. This is shown in the UCAS paper here and shows that this system of breaking down barriers is already well established and should be being promoted by LabourList and everyone else in the Labour movement

Keep cool and carry on. 

Regards 

Bernard Naish

*****

Dear LabourList

My family came into political exile from Apartheid South Africa in 1964 clutching exit permits. We were issued with certificates of identity. My parents’ got supply teaching posts in Education Priority Areas in SE London. We became naturalised citizens in 1969. I was treated as a home student when I went to university in 1967. 

I will resign from the party if the government retrospectively increases the time required for immigrants of any kind to settle from 5 to 10 years as it’d be grossly unfair for adults and worse for children. 

Labour needs to value people whose work is vital e.g. for health and social care and to stand up for our Party’s values or become irrelevant in our new multi-party clickbait society dominated by ultra rich rightwing bros.

Yours truly

Jackie Landman

Cultural change

Hi Emma,

So glad you called out those who claim to be ‘on the right side of history’, the good people over horrific events in the West Country.

A 79 old women was beaten to death with a metal pipe. I posted on Bluesky earlier when I realised how appalling the posts were. And they claim they left X because it had become filled with hate?

Keep up the superb work Emma. LabourList just gets better!

V Best and ‘Yours in Socialism’

Niall Devitt

*****

Dear Editor

I am something of an anomaly in my area for Labour people as a Starmer apologist. Effectively everyone around me, for many months now, has referred to him as the ‘temporary Prime Minister’ and have essentially been waiting for him to resign. I haven’t agreed with everything he’s said or done, but I’ve been put off from joining the protesters by the simple fact that we’re in danger of being seen as a continuation of the previous governments. When we were elected, the country breathed a collective sigh of relief over one simple thing; that the Number 10 revolving door chaos had finally ended. One of the big reasons for our sluggish economy has been political upheaval, it’s hard to plan ahead when you have no idea if the next guy to come along is going to wildly change the rules. I’m agnostic about Starmer’s departure, and I’m looking forward to seeing what Andy Burnham can do, but this whole debacle has exposed something I’ve been slamming my head against the wall for for many years; we, the left, need stop fighting each other.

Leftist infighting has been a tradition, it seems, for a very long time. The best parody of this came from Life of Brian, with the Judean Peoples Front vs the Peoples Front of Judea. The joke of course, being that there were multiple groups, who all want essentially the same thing, yet refuse to collaborate against the much scarier power they fight against. We’re currently experiencing this ourselves with the Greens. To some extent, while there might have been disagreements within the Labour party for some time, we’ve never really had this problem as Labour was by far the most popular and effective party of the left. Currently, we’re staring down the barrel of possibility that the next government our nation has is a Reform government, something that should alarm every right thinking leftist and yet we’re more interested in playing No True Scotsman than uniting.

To an extent, I understood the mentality of the Greens to begin with. With the seeming rightward shift of the Labour party early on they wanted to present themselves as an alternative voice trying to drag it back. The problem is that now they seem to be trying to position themselves as the new ‘true’ party of the left. Some of this is down to how our election system works (I’m election reform agnostic as well, I think the current system works fine to some extent), but surely by now they must have realized that focusing their attacks on us and not Reform is only playing into the oppositions hands. For our part, we haven’t done much better. In the wake of our losses to the Greens, the prevailing opinion among my local CLP was that we were too harsh on the Greens.

This year is the centennial anniversary of the national general strike, where unions across the country simultaneously went on strike to protest working conditions and pay. This was a great moment for workers, however what often gets left out is that it didn’t work. The movement collapsed, in no small part because the various groups that made up the general strike were continuously fighting each other.

I’ve heard one of Andy Burnhams goals is to seek support cross party. I have my own reservations about this, as there are a great many things I disagree with the Greens on, while applauding this step to remedy the problem I have previously discussed. I highly believe this will be an uphill struggle however. Zack Polanski has not made it a secret that he has no interest in cooperating with us. Perhaps if our electoral chances begin to shift, he will change his mind, perhaps as we inch closer to a general election and find Reform still in with a real chance of success.

Do we, the left, have it in us to put our disagreements aside against a common foe? God knows I hope so.

Joshua Copeland-Jones

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