After a week of damaging headlines for the Tories on budget U-turns, possible expenses scandals, and George ‘6 jobs’ Osborne, should we be surprised that Tom Watson and his kind have turned the negative media attention back to Labour?

For the record, I am not on the ‘hard-left’. Indeed, as a member of the Labour Party, I spent part of the 1970s successfully fighting attempts by militants to take over the Southampton Constituency organisation.

Like millions of others, I was inspired by Tony Blair’s election victory in 1997. I believed we could achieve permanent changes which would improve the lives and opportunities of ordinary people, to temper the damage inflicted on the country by Margaret Thatcher’s extreme right-wing governments.

Policies such as the introduction of the minimum wage, Sure Start, tax credits and the Good Friday agreement seemed to justify my belief.

However, I became disillusioned as the Blair and Brown governments introduced privatisation into the NHS and other public services, hugely accelerated the Tories’ disastrous policy of using Private Finance Initiatives to invest in public infrastructure, failed to roll back any of the attacks on the Trades Unions, which had, admittedly, become too powerful in the late 1970s, failed to deal with the housing crisis or tax avoidance and evasion, and nurtured the financial services industry to the detriment of manufacturing.

When the party finally lost power, in 2010, it was the first Labour government ever to leave office with greater wealth inequality than when it had been elected. By then, it had lost thousands of party members, and millions of voters, including me, who could no longer tell the difference between it and the Conservatives.

Such has been the party’s shift to the right that, since re-joining in September 2015, following the election of Jeremy Corbyn, I have found myself branded in the media as a ‘hard-left entryist’.

Meanwhile, so-called ‘moderate’ members of the Parliamentary Labour Party have spent 18 months carping, resigning, briefing, criticising from the side-lines, all the time deliberately preventing any possibility of proper opposition.

It makes me wonder who really is out to destroy the Labour Party, and who the cheerleaders will be when that has been achieved.

Siobhan O’Rourke
Netley Abbey, Southampton