We are divided by more than north and south | Letters

At the heart of Mike Harding’s letter (23 November) is a call for greater understanding of the needs and desires of diverse communities in our country. I am all for that. What a pity he boiled it down to a north-south divide. I too am a lifelong guardian reader (64 years) and I have a day job as a children’s author. Over the past 20 years I have visited hundreds of schools and communities up and down the country. My list of communities where I saw need and neglect would include Western-super-Mare, Trowbridge, Southampton and many more, all geographically south of Watford. I have also seen the managed decline he refers to in the industrial cities and smaller towns mentioned in his letter. However, in my visits to Edinburgh, Leeds, Glasgow and Manchester, I didn’t see neglect in the Morningside, Harrogate, Bearsden or Didsbury areas of these great cities.

I wonder if Mr Harding has been to Haringey, Lambeth or Dagenham. They are all in London. Our diverse country has wonderful regional differences which we should all cherish. To improve things we need to pull together. John Harris’s excellent piece about Lincolnshire elsewhere in the Guardian (For Labour too Brexit means Brexit) demonstrates how difficult this will be. Please can we focus on what needs to be done, not point scoring.
Adrian Townsend
Garsington, Oxfordshire

• Aditya Chakrabortty could have stayed on the English side of Offa’s Dyke and got a close up of the same issues he came across in Pontypool (Just about managing? In these towns that’s a dream, 22 November). Pontypool’s problems can be mirrored in many, if not most, small rural towns, positioned outside the more affluent areas of the country. The issues facing such communities have been continuously ignored. In the Forest of Dean our towns have an industrial history to be proud of, but they are now shadows of their former selves. The main issues are always the same: transport, health, law and order and education.

Perhaps developing our existing railway infrastructure or resuscitating some redundant lines, would be far more beneficial and cheaper than HS2? Maybe some decentralisation could benefit the NHS. Rural communities are punished a second time when suffering ill health or injury, with round trips of 60 miles for basic medical care that could be offered by enhanced local cottage hospitals. Rural police resources are so stretched they only appear able to record crime, not solve or prevent it. Education? Despite the efforts of parents, governors and staff alike, too many of our local schools have been in special measures. Political debate is far too city-centric.
Mark Sargent
Aylburton, Gloucestershire

• Why should the inhabitants of Pontypool and similar ones right across these blighted isles have to pay tax direct to the Treasury in London? Wouldn’t the tax be better kept at a local level to revitalise the local economy?

This is where a local currency comes in. A local bank could be established to issue electronic Pontypool pounds to be circulated locally, nourishing those parts that the chancellor fails to reach. Employees would elect to receive a proportion of their income in tax-free e-pounds that could only be spent at local businesses and services, thereby continuously benefiting the local community.
Geoff Naylor
Winchester, Hampshire

• Having just completed a road trip round Britain with some visiting Australian relatives how I agree with Aditya Chakrabortty. We visited the usual suspects – Oxford, the Cotswolds and Stratford, but also, because we have northern roots, we visited Liverpool, Oldham, Newcastle and Sunderland. My thoughts are exactly as Aditya suggests – that Theresa May should visit these areas. The thing that did stand out was the amazing and resilient people we met along the way, always with a friendly smile, particularly the lady in the National Glass Centre in Sunderland – an amazing place we did not know existed and which we found by accident. The people of these areas deserve better.
Joan Procter
Worthing, West Sussex

• Simon Jenkins is right to criticise the government’s infrastructure schemes (To the capital go all the spoils, 24 November), but the problem is not just the north-south divide. The arguments for infrastructure are that these projects are an investment in our future. But the most crucial element of our future lies with our children and money spent on HS2, for example, would be more wisely spent on improving the education we give to the young (and I mean proper education, not Govean).

A future generation equipped both to serve the economy directly, but also well educated in the round, able to assess arguments and organise their thinking on rational grounds, will be essential if we are to have a well-functioning democracy, and would reap far more dividends than trimming an hour off the journey from London to Manchester (or, as Simon Jenkins points out, more likely from Manchester to London). But no mention in the autumn statement of how our hard-pressed schools could be given any help.
Professor Norman Gowar
London

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We are divided by more than north and south | Letters

I remember the welfare state being built. A divided Labour cannot save it | Harry Leslie Smith

As the date for the Labour conference grows closer, like dark clouds gathering on the horizon, my thoughts are focused on the social and economic injustices from our nation’s history that helped form this party’s progressive political ideology.

Come this October it will be 90 years since my eldest sister Marion was buried in a pauper’s pit on the outskirts of Barnsley. Not a day has gone by in the intervening decades when I have not thought of her miserable death from TB in a workhouse infirmary, or her ignoble burial in a mass grave for indigents because my parents, being from the working class, were too poor to afford my sister a doctor’s care.

My sister’s tragic end came at a time when Britain was ruled by a Tory government that had unleashed austerity on the citizens of Britain. Her death, and the misery I endured from poverty in the 1930s, were caused by government indifference to the plight of working-class Britain – and that politicised me to become a pragmatic socialist. I learned during the Great Depression that there can be no middle road to social or economic justice when my family, along with millions of other British citizens, were forced to live in substandard housing or slums because the government didn’t adequately tax its most affluent citizens and corporations.

Labour must end its eternal battle between its heart and its head. Both are necessary for electoral victory

It’s why since 1945 my political ideology has been fixed in orbit around the Labour party’s commitment to social democracy. So, when I was invited to speak at the Labour conference in 2014 about what life was like in Britain before the NHS, I was honoured. I was also gratified that I was finally able to give the speech I had waited a lifetime to give about the iniquities ordinary people endure if there is no social safety network to protect them.

Since then, I have spoken all across Britain to small and large crowds about how my generation struggled to build a welfare state, and how that became a tide which raised all boats from the miseries of unharnessed capitalism. But my talks were not so much about my past as about everyone else’s future, and how the younger generations must now shoulder the responsibility to maintain and preserve my generation’s legacy, the welfare state.

But for the young to make a difference and reverse years of neoliberalism that have fragmented this society and ossified their ability to prosper, the left must unite for one purpose: to defeat conservative politics that benefits the few at the expense of the many. Those of social conscience who want a nation based upon egalitarian ideals can only accomplish this if the Labour party ends its eternal battle between its heart and its head. Both are necessary for electoral victory. The warring factions in Labour must unite in a grand alliance that includes the PLP and its 500,000 enthusiastic members, as well as the millions of voters all across these islands who want a new deal.

Make no mistake: I am a fervent supporter of Jeremy Corbyn but I will not forget or ignore how I came to speak at that Labour conference in 2014. I will always be grateful to Andy Burnham, along with Ed Miliband and his office of dedicated staffers, who asked me to speak about healthcare because they believed in an NHS that is for the people and not for the benefit of hedge funds. It’s why, having met many of the members of the PLP over the past two years in every nook and cranny of this country, I can attest to their professionalism and their dedication to social justice. But in their anguish after Brexit, I believe the PLP members erred when they tried to oust a leader who had been elected less than a year earlier. I understand their frustrations just as well as those party members who are now angry at the PLP. I can see the merits to both sides in this acrimonious battle.

That’s why this year’s conference in Liverpool will be more important than even one held right before a general election. The speeches will be a window for the British electorate to see whether Labour can tell the human stories that win elections, rather than just settling old scores.

So, for those members given the great honour of addressing conference delegates – whether they support Corbyn or Owen Smith – they must remember that history is watching them and measure their words accordingly. This is not the time nor the place for the politics of revenge, but instead a time for amity. This is the time for Labour to reaffirm its commitment to forming the next government and building a compassionate Britain, where all are welcomed. The only way to do that is to get our own house in order.

I remember the welfare state being built. A divided Labour cannot save it | Harry Leslie Smith