Tired old politics of abuse now irrelevant

Western Daily Press, 5 Jun 2024, p. 19

It’s rather sad that Paul Mercer resorts to throwing around cancel-culture smears rather than engaging in an intelligent conversation (‘Feeling sorry for our capital city’, Letters, May 31).

In his rather limp attempt at humour, Paul is right about one thing: the ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn!’ campaigning anthem will most certainly be deployed in Mr Corbyn’s campaign for re-election to parliament. Oh and of course, there were 160,000 ‘Trots’ singing this refrain at the Glastonbury Festival in 2017.

Paul depicts very well the tired old politics of abuse and cancellation that are now irrelevant to the times we are in. Across the country, voters are rejecting the bankrupt, infantile left/right narrative, and are embracing a new kind of politics that privileges independent voices, honesty and truth-telling.

The great Noam Chomsky advocates creating what he calls ‘an authentic independent political party, a real party, based on popular participation from the ground up, not a top-down candidate producing organization like the two official parties’. That’s certainly what we’ll be doing here in Gloucestershire for the next five weeks.

Dr Richard House

Stroud, Gloucestershire

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