Sir, – There is some truth to Vincent Browne's account of the Labour Party, but it is not the entire story ("Labour has never really had 'core vales'", Opinion & Analysis, June 4th).
The older leadership was intensely conservative; they lacked the confidence and imagination to project an alternative to the status quo, even if they wanted to, which they didn’t.
But there were always rank-and-file members of the Labour Party who saw themselves – perhaps still do – as socialists. Theirs, however, was not the socialism of James Connolly. They were too respectable for that. People looking for revolutionary politics could always join the Communist Party or team up with left-wing republicans.
Their socialism was that of the British Labour Party and the postwar welfare state. Some had lived in Britain and brought their politics back with them; universal access to free healthcare and education seemed worth striving for.
The abandonment of anything remotely resembling Labour values by Tony Blair left this segment of the Labour Party here severely adrift. The section associated with Democratic Left had already lost all hope with the collapse of the Soviet Union; the move to an anodyne liberalism, silly red roses and all, was inevitable, as there was nowhere else to go.
Any chance of Labour reconnecting with its social democratic past is dependent on the some kind of revitalising of the broad European left in the search for solutions to the crisis. Right now, there is no sign of that happening. – Yours, etc,
EOIN DILLON,
Ceannt Fort,
Mount Brown,
Dublin 8.