Readers respond to an article by Owen Jones about Keir Starmerâs record so far
Keir Starmer in Sheffield. âWhy not give Starmer a chance?â Photograph: Ryan Crockett/JMP/REX/Shutterstock
Keir Starmer in Sheffield. âWhy not give Starmer a chance?â Photograph: Ryan Crockett/JMP/REX/Shutterstock
Letters
Wed 14 Apr 2021 12.06 EDT
Last modified on Wed 14 Apr 2021 12.42 EDT
Owen Jones is right to assert that Keir Starmer needs a coherent vision (Behind the scenes, Labour MPs are losing faith in Keir Starmer, 12 April), but he cannot seriously be suggesting that Labour returns to the Corbyn era, which oversaw its worst election defeat in living memory.
When we pay National Insurance we expect the government will use that money to support those of us who are needy. Some of us might be ill and others be out of work. What we don’t expect is that our hard-earned wages will be used by the NHS to pay a private company to do work the NHS can do itself (Plans to partially privatise York Hospital A&E slammed, March 2). Companies survive by making a profit. That profit is then shared by people who are rich enough to have bought shares. It is disgraceful that York A&E is to be partially privatised. York’s MP Rachael Maskell is right to protest.
Christian Vassie (Letters, December 12) writes that ‘Brexit won’t sustain British fishing.’ He’s right. Fishing is a shadow of what it was. When I was a child living in Grimsby in the 1940s my father worked in a smoke house, our neighbour was a trawler skipper and another lived two doors away on the other side. At the corner of the cul-de-sac where I played was a third skipper and three fathers of friends who lived in the cul-de worked in fishing. I saw some fishing rankings recently. Grimsby was fifteenth. Hull wasn’t even in the list. Grimsby still processes fish but it comes by road from Scottish ports already filleted and frozen in blocks. Friends living there say that in the referendum Grimbarians voted to leave 70-30 because nostalgia for the time when Grimsby claimed to be the world’s biggest fishing port (Hull made that claim too!) made people think Brexit would bring back fishing.