The country has woken up to the new nasty party

I believe the root cause of Labour’s local election disaster was not the loss of the Jewish vote in London, or its failure to attract the Ukip vote across the country, but something more sinister.

Jeremy Corbyn’s failure to address his party’s anti-Semitism, his comments on the gas and nerve agent attacks in Syria and Salisbury respectively, and his tacit condoning of Momentum’s abusive internet trolling has turned Labour into the new ‘nasty party’, and voters are finally waking up to it. Roy Daniels, Luton I am a Labour supporter but I agree with Lord Blunkett’s call in The Mail on Sunday last week for the party to have more widespread appeal.

The ongoing scandal of antiSemitism within Labour, and the party’s lack of clear plans on Brexit, damaged it in the local elections. The moderates need to get rid of the fanatics and hypocrites and start taking control again.

And they should stop all this simpering to young people, which is what Jeremy Corbyn seems to spend a lot of time doing. Instead they should come up with good policies and ideas. V. de Bheal, London David Blunkett is living in cloud cuckoo land if he believes that people like myself will fall for his New Labour II. The really bad news for him is that I never actually supported its predecessor, New Labour I, in the first place.

I believe the British people are growing truly weary of middleof-the-road ideologies that have caused so much of our culture, industry and enterprise to evaporate in a cloud of smug, ruling-class indifference.

To whom can we turn instead, when the Tories and Liberal Democrats are just slightly different shades of the same colour?

I just hope the vacuum is filled with something inspiring and empowering. But I shan’t be holding my breath. Don Broad, Dartford, Kent Lord Blunkett’s article made it plain that he doesn’t like the direction of Labour under the leadership of Mr Corbyn. I would like to hear his answer to one question: if Corbyn or a similar replacement is leading Labour at the next General Election, would he still vote for them? Terry Payne, Banstead, Surrey I welcome Lord Blunkett’s call for Labour moderates to ‘take up cudgels’ against Corbyn, but MPs have shown time and again that they are not willing to do so. A. Freeman, Sussex Lord Blunkett sneers at Jeremy Corbyn for his failure to paint London ‘red’ after Tory difficulties with the Windrush scandal.

He has clearly forgotten that as Home Secretary, he introduced visas for Jamaicans visiting their relatives in Britain.

For British people of Caribbean heritage, the introduction of such visas felt like a slap in the face.

Chaka Artwell, Oxford