It would be helpful for progressive parties and the media to focus more on why so many people voted for Reform UK. Your article (What’s behind surge in support for Reform and Greens across England? Five key takeaways, 10 May) indicates that it gained more support in deprived areas – but this doesn’t answer the question why.

What sort of UK do Reform voters want? Do they want councils that reduce local care services for their vulnerable elderly relatives and children, to save a few pennies off council tax? The ending of environmental protections? The scrapping of equal-opportunities policies that protect women and minority groups?

When Reform voters are asked about the party’s policies, they fail to articulate much apart from “stop the boats” – because Reform’s plans have very little detail or real‑world application.

The Labour government has been in power for less than two years and has delivered the Renters’ Rights Act and the Employment Rights Act, removed the two-child cap on universal credit, increased provision of free school meals and facilitated millions more NHS appointments.

The focus on personality-driven politics has left the door open for local governments to be led by privately educated multimillionaires who dismiss the climate crisis and favour cryptocurrency. How this will help people struggling with the cost of living and chronic health conditions related to pollution, poverty and inequality remains unclear.
Paula Riseborough
Bath

I’ve been involved in the trade union movement all of my adult life, from the defeats of the 1980s to the austerity of the 2010s. In that time, the Labour party effectively abandoned its historical base. I was fortunate to get a small grant to attend Ruskin College in Oxford and the University of Sheffield, supported by the Transport and General Workers’ Union, and latterly Unite after working in the agricultural construction sector.

I am possibly the last of a generation of working-class adults to come through that avenue and still make a contribution to the wider trade union and labour movement. Labour will only reconnect with its working-class base if it creates the opportunities for working-class adults, through grants and wider support, to advance through education as part of an overall strategy to give a new generation the same chance I had.

Reform has simply latched on to the disenfranchised working-class vote using simplified language to address complicated questions. By the way, attacking the Greens is not the answer: their position on basic income and trade union rights is resonating with progressive voters.

I fear, however, we are facing two things: the real threat of the Labour party disappearing as a political force (this incidentally happened to its sister party in Ireland) and, second, as Eric Hobsbawm noted nearly half a century ago, “the forward march of labour halted”.
Greg Sachno
Portaferry, County Down

Andrea Egan is at pains to demonstrate how the Labour party has severed its links with the working class, but the working class has been conned out of existence (As leader of the UK’s largest union, I want Labour to succeed – but that means radical change, 10 May).

I have a professional qualification, my wife and I owned our house, and we were expected to consider ourselves middle class and therefore vote Conservative. The fact that I would wake up at 5.15am to go to work, would often wear overalls and safety shoes, and for most of my life was less than six weeks from penury if I had become unemployed, makes me working class, in my opinion.

From Thatcher onwards, great effort was made not to improve the lives of working people but to kid them that they were no longer working class – and therefore should vote Conservative.

Regrettably, the Labour party went along with this deception and Tony Blair, as leader, made matters much worse by abolishing clause IV of its written constitution. This originally stated: “To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry.” Workers need to recognise they are still workers even if they sit behind a desk. It goes on: “and the most equitable distribution thereof”.

We should be screaming from the rooftops that society is horribly wrong and unequal. Calling yourself “middle class” does not make it any better.
Chris Sumner
Waltham Abbey, Essex

Keir Starmer is wrong to say the election results do not mean a tack to the left or right is necessary (Opinion, 8 May). He has already tacked hugely to the right by attacking refugees,disabled people, jury trials and the right to protest over Gaza. His U-turns over winter fuel allowance and the two-child benefit cap have shown up his value-free incompetence. He has presided over a systematic purging of idealistic leftwingers from the party.

These betrayals of Labour party values have emboldened the far right and disheartened many long-term supporters. A reversal of the unpopular policies and a decisive shift to the left is needed to save the Labour party and, for this, Keir Starmer has to go. So too do all the senior Labour politicians who supported these dire policies – his replacement needs to be someone who did not.
Louise Christian
London

Political positioning has been the death of this government, as it was for successive governments in recent years. It ducked the hard decisions in its manifesto and has been trying to catch up with reality ever since.

Europe, defence, energy, welfare, tax and investing in our physical and social infrastructure all need coherent policies that make sense not just individually but as a whole. It is that organising principle that is missing and is the main challenge whether for the prime minister or his potential successors.

Can they provide a rationale that will guide the inevitable trade-offs, or will it be more crisis management mixed with shopping-list policies? It’s time for the whole truth. Half truths will no longer do.
Tom Kelly
Prime minister’s official spokesman, 2001-07