Jeremy Corbyn, stop obsessing over the protest politics of your youth – we live in entirely different times now

How sad that Jeremy Corbyn is considering reintroducing Clause IV. Why must today’s politicians continually look to the past? The Tories are no better: taking the UK out of the EU, bringing back grammar schools and the like.

Having recently read a book on post-war planning during the depths of the Second World War, there were talents at work with radical plans to address social issues in post-war Britain. There were giants such as William Beveridge, Rab Butler and Ernest Bevin. Where are today’s giants? We only have a set of self-interested children with short-term plans that serve their personal ambitions, or an old man looking back to the protest politics of his youth.

Time to find some new giants to plan a future health, education and housing policy that will address the 21st century and not the problems and attitudes of the 1950s.

CC Elshaw
Headley Down

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Why is the wording of Labour’s Clause IV such a conference issue?

The end of Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure at the helm of the Labour Party appears to be coming to an end. In order for the party to reclaim the stronghold it held during the Blair premiership, it requires a leader with the willingness and ability to be scrutinised on Radio 4’s Today programme. That person may well be Sir Keir Starmer.

Christopher Learmont-Hughes
Wirral

Why the vitriol for Corbyn?

The Independent is a paper I have been trialling recently, hoping to find a fresh, alternative and objective voice in the rather muddy world of the media.

I have discovered three things:

1) Your relationship with Jeremy Corbyn is like that of a surly individual waiting to be insulted. I am no Corbynista: however, it appears to me that even if he does what you scream for, you look around, mumbling discontent, and find another issue. He can’t win.

2) Some of your Voices contributions are genuinely different, thought provoking and enjoyable. But not all.

3) You have not mentioned the Rugby League enough in my time reading the paper. As this is an issue for me, it probably makes me a Corbynista and therefore irrelevant as I don’t fit with what I’ve observed as a rather sullen, metropolitan view on life.

Robert W Simpson
Halifax

Climate strike

I read your articles about the climate strike and I’m sorry that I could not be a part of a similar movement in Iran, where I’m from.

We also have a crisis concerning our attitude towards nature. There are no climate-change programmes and next to no awareness about our environment here in Iran. I studied food science and I know what we are dealing with, so I decided to send an email to show my support and my grief about not being able to be among people who respect Earth.

If there is anything I can do beyond training a new generation (I’m a kindergarten teacher), I would be thrilled.

Zeinab Ojani
Address supplied

Climate hypocrisy

When protesters stop using planes to go on holidays abroad, eating food out of season flown in from abroad, and stop using fossil fuels for transport, their protests might be taken seriously. Yes, thousands protested. Many more did not. They did not skive from school, university, college or work. They are the silent majority.

Philip Pound
London SE26

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Liberal bias?

Politeness dictates that I refer to John Humphrys’ retirement claim that his former paymasters “tried to mould the nation into its own liberal-left image” as odd.

How refreshing it would have been if the man who – more than almost anyone else – personified the entrenched, immovable, white, male make-up of the BBC (an organisation recently embroiled in unfair gender pay claims and which has failed spectacularly to make inroads into the significant presence of ethnic minorities in its licence fee-funded ranks) had said something about that instead.

Amanda Baker
Edinburgh

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