Wanted: Tory backbone

SIR – Your leader (September 28) rightly excoriated Labour’s absurd policies, which would cost over £300billion. At the Conservative conference next week, the Prime Minister and Cabinet should find some Thatcherite backbone and attack Labour head-on.

The Conservatives will never win a substantial majority otherwise. The vacillating anti-business, “Labour-lite” style that Theresa May has offered to date led to election disaster.

David T Price

Managing director, Oxfordshire Glass Banbury, Oxfordshire

SIR – My teenage son spent a couple of days this week watching the television coverage of the Labour conference. After Jeremy Corbyn’s speech he went online and joined the Conservative Party. Obviously they are not fooling all the young people in the country.

Paul Pritz

Wolverhampton

SIR – If Theresa May is so keen to tell young people that free-market capitalism works, could she explain to them why property developers would build homes selling for £250,000£300,000 (which might just be within sight of affordability for them)?

Hard-working, lower-paid people suffer a double whammy – particularly in London – being unable to afford to live near their places of work and having to pay high fares to commute many miles daily.

Andrew Papworth

Billericay, Essex

SIR – Can it really be the case that, not content with 13 years of “New Labour” (well, actually very Old-labour Gordon Brown covered with a Blairite sugar coating), the Tories are now convinced that the country “needs” a hefty dose of Corbynist Marxism in order to ensure another long period of stable Conservative rule?

What kind of country would it leave to our children and grandchildren?

Brian Gedalla

London N3

SIR – Peter Miller (Letters, September 29) asks why schools do not teach about the failures of socialism. He may find the answer by visiting any school common room and seeing if he can find a single teacher who did not vote for Corbyn.

Charles Pugh

London SW10