Don’t tell me what I am, thank you

Let me start with the shortest word in that sentence – ‘is’. To the best of my knowledge and belief, I have never met Keith Bate. How, then, can he claim to know – and know ‘clearly’ – what I am or am not?

Bate accuses me of being ‘under the delusion that Labour won the recent election’. I spent the last few years of my working life as a lecturer, with duties including marking work submitted by students. When submitting work which would be seen only by a couple of internal markers and maybe the external examiner, a student would ensure that sources were cited. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to ask someone submitting a letter for publication in ‘Britain's best selling regional newspaper’ to do the same.

So, here is a very simple, non-rhetorical question to Keith Bate: can you substantiate, by precise quotation from my original text, that I entertain such a delusion? Or is this just another of those highly imaginative missives in which the author just makes up another writer’s supposed views?

Incidentally, David Winnick, a man for whom I have considerable respect, has as robust a record as Corbyn for voting against Labour governments when he believed it necessary. Most creditably, he was able to curb Blair’s authoritarian instincts with regard to detention before charge for persons suspected of terrorist offences.

And could Bate identify this “anti-democratic support who have latched on to the present Labour Party”?

I suspect that this is another example of the ‘entrist’ myth. Awkward fact: total membership of all far-left groups – Socialist Workers, CP, etc – probably amounts to 5,000 at the most generous estimate; Labour Party membership is comfortably more than half a million.

Do the sums.

Alan T Harrison, Walsall