Labour’s hoodwinking the country’s young
JEREMY CORBYN’s speech has made me pity the deluded young people who support him and who have benefited from a free market economy. My dad, who is 80, left school at 14 and started an apprenticeship with a local manufacturer of vehicle radiators. He worked hard and eventually became a charge hand. When needed, he worked nights at the Basildon factory, travelling ten miles by bus because he couldn’t afford a car. Eventually he saved enough and, with the support of my maternal family, bought the first family home. When he wanted a telephone to be installed to keep in touch with his mum, who was in ill health, it took 20 weeks. All this was difficult, and he made sacrifices to overcome the obstacles put in his way. These obstacles didn’t come from low pay or lack of support from family and friends, they came from a socialist government who thought it was OK to take 33 per cent of his hard-earned income to subsidise failing state-owned industry, and trade unions who at times bullied him into taking part in strikes. Nevertheless, he became a shop steward, but worked on building a relationship with management rather than opposing it. My mother worked part-time between taking us to school. Both Mum and Dad served on the Parent Teacher Association; they didn’t petition the council for money, they held fundraising events to support kids who couldn’t afford trips. Mum and Dad taught me tolerance and introduced me to their friends. some were gay, others were migrants of colour and others were migrants from Poland, fleeing oppression. last week in Brighton, I saw all that my Mum and Dad stand for trashed by a labour Party that sneers and intimidates. It is a labour party with factions who are racist and antisemitic and a labour party not fit to carry the name. It genuinely breaks my heart to see young people being lied to and deceived by a bunch of Marxists.
GLenn BRoadBenT, armley, Leeds. As A young person in the seventies, I remember something that young people who voted labour in this year’s General Election have yet to experience. I was a student nurse and had the ‘pleasure’ of cleaning hospital wards because cleaners and porters were on strike. I had to queue for petrol — that is if you could find a garage that had any. And, of course, I was trying to get on the housing ladder with mortgage rates standing at 15 per cent. still, that gives today’s youth something to look forward to.
a.McGRaTh, Wallingford, oxon.