Disappointed with your columnist’s attack on Corbyn

MY wife and I came recently to The Yorkshire Post from the Guardian, and are impressed with the range of its interests, its even- handed reporting and the breadth of opinion from both columnists and letter writers.

As Labour supporters we soon realised which columnists had a generally similar outlook to ours, and counted Jayne Dowle among them – until this Monday, with her extraordinary attack on Jeremy Corbyn ( The Yorkshire

Post, August 24). It bore the Corbyn- bashing trademarks: insults without evidence, inconvenient truths ignored, factual statements wrong.

Jeremy was leader for a year less than Jayne says. And Labour MPs did “challenge his grip” in 2016 – and lost. Jeremy has “a total tin ear for the mood of the country” – but made Labour the largest political party in Europe.

He “did enough damage to the Labour party when he was in charge” – but in 2017 achieved the biggest increase in Labour votes since 1945. And he might have done well in 2019, but for Brexit and relentless hostility from both outside and inside his party.

Now poor Jeremy mustn’t speak – not even to a magazine podcast! What are the ‘ thought police’ so afraid of? Meanwhile his derided policies are being adopted by the Tories, who are praised for it. Funny that.

From: Roger Backhouse, Orchard Road, Upper Poppleton, York.

WE’LL never know whether the Covid- 19 crisis would have been handled better by Jeremy Corbyn. He didn’t get elected Prime Minister. What’s certain is that he would have had to cope with problems created by previous Conservative administrations.

The NHS used to have some slack, deliberately so to enable it to cope with crises. Slack disappeared from 2010 onwards.

Problems facing public health are also of Conservative making. Back in 2012 the expert Dr Gabriel Scally told a House of Commons committee that restructuring of the NHS would impede response to emergencies.

Public health responsibility was moved to local authorities, but with fewer resources and less power. A clear command chain was replaced by a fragmented one. The Minister for Care didn’t even have a list of email addresses for Directors of Public Health.

I feel a touch of sympathy for Ministers and a Prime Minister clearly out of their depth, but they have reaped the whirlwind of previous Conservative mistakes.