LOLA Cook concluded her start of general election year opinion piece for the Hereford Times by urging voters to find out as much as they can regarding what the various candidates’ parties have to offer the voters.

That can be difficult without reading the parties’ manifestos or menus of what they have to offer nearer the time, and voters asking questions on the basis of what they read and attending all-local-party-candidates’ questioning meetings called hustings. Existing policies on websites can help.

ALSO READ:

I can argue that Anna Coda (former Labour Party parliamentary candidate) seems to treat voters as robots or gaming machines turned on or off voting one way or another purely on the basis of poll results and past election results (Letters, January 25).

Much has changed since the 2017 and 2019 general elections regarding what Labour ‘has to offer the voters’: the Corbyn-led party offered renationalisation of national utilities (a policy that had appeared in the Green Party manifesto for 2015); a Sir Keir Starmer-authorised ‘Forde Report’ investigation into the claims that his predecessor was anti-semitic effectively exonerated Jeremy Corbyn but failed to stop the expulsion of Jewish anti-Zionist Labour Party members. Sir Keir Starmer has broken major internal elections pledges he made to his party members, and he and his shadow cabinet have accepted freebies from water companies, etc.

Coda gives no indication regarding the provenance of the poll results she draws from or makes any mention of local Labour Party membership figures. Of the three Labour Party members I got to know when moving to Hereford in 2017, one has died and the other two resigned their membership in disgust at the ousting of Corbyn.

What are your thoughts?

You can send a letter to the editor to have your say by clicking here.

Letters should not exceed 250 words and local issues take precedence.

Coda and her crew have also failed to respond to my December 26 citing of Starmer saying that an incoming Labour Government would not be turning on the ‘spending taps’ to fund public services.

I conclude by stating that while Starmer places his public services funding hopes on ‘economic growth’, increasing prevalence of freak weather conditions makes that unlikely, and the agenda proposed in economist Guy Standing’s latest book The Politics of Time: Gaining Control in an Age of Uncertainty is much more realistic than anything the ‘austerity’ parties have to offer while local authorities are driven by austerity into bankruptcy.

ALAN WHEATLEY

Hereford