Don’t use crisis to advance leftwing agenda

Ralph Tebbutt is living in a dream world if he believes in a socialist utopia (May 21). With the exception of the democratic socialism practised by Clement Attlee’s government after the war, when it was run by those who really priotised the interests of the working class, socialist governments have been a disaster wherever they have been tried.

One only has to look at Venezuela, which, despite possessing the greatest oil reserves on the planet, is an economic basket case, thanks to its socialist leaders, or Zimbabwe, where so- called socialist ideals reduced the bread basket of subSaharan Africa to an economic desert.

Centrally planned economies always fail because they operate

against human nature, are incapable of forecasting supply and demand correctly and, when they are not succeeding, their governments always resort to coercion. Unbridled capitalism is not desirable but the answer does not lie with the ideologues of the left, who, when they find that the world does not fit in with their theories, try to force the former to change, rather than accepting that the latter ideas are wrong.

When Michael Steed seeks to blame Brexit for our current problems he clearly does not realise that the members of the EU have unsurprisingly shown themselves to be concerned for their own people, not the interests of a putative European superstate.

What is obvious is that those who support the theories of the left espoused by the intelligentsia, not the working class, are trying to use the coronavirus emergency to advance policies which have been rejected time and again by the electorate.

Colin Bullen