Robert Jenrick isn’t any roughly function fashion for Labour | Letters

Robert Jenrick isn’t diagnosing dysfunction. He’s production it (It’s simple to push aside Robert Jenrick’s fare-dodging stunt. But he understands one thing Keir Starmer doesn’t, 30 May). The factor isn’t whether or not persons are pissed off by means of fare-dodgers or spooked by means of barber stores that keep open past due. It’s why that resentment will get extra political airtime than landlords mountain climbing rents, billionaires dodging taxes, or personal fairness companies bleeding the NHS dry.

What Jenrick is doing isn’t tapping into some common British frustration with rule-breaking. He’s attractive within the oldest trick within the reactionary playbook. Inflate petty infractions into ethical panics. Redirect public rage downward. Claim the mantle of commonplace sense. It’s the politics of distraction, dressed up as fear for order.

When Freedland suggests Keir Starmer may just be told from this, no longer the insurance policies however the presentation, he endorses the very efficiency of energy that makes other people really feel unheard. It’s no longer that Starmer fails to look tricky sufficient on delinquent behaviour. It’s that he fails to talk to the actual delinquent behaviours that outline lifestyles beneath past due capitalism. Wage robbery. Housing precarity. Digital surveillance. Austerity itself.

Fare-dodging is steadily an act of desperation or defiance in a machine designed to extract. “Weird Turkish barber shops” isn’t a impartial remark. It is a dog-whistle wrapped in folksy suspicion. The actual dysfunction is structural, no longer stylistic. Any politics that treats damaged home windows as extra pressing than damaged lives will simplest strengthen the rot.

We don’t want Labour to raised mimic Tory speaking issues. We want braveness. Courage to call the actual villains. Courage to refuse the scapegoat circuit. Courage to imagine the general public can deal with greater than tabloid moralism.
Addie Marphen
London

Jonathan Freedland is right kind when he says it’s “awkward to take lessons in politics from Robert Jenrick”. However, Jenrick glosses over his birthday party’s section within the reasons and thus has no figuring out of what introduced us right here. The society that my and my oldsters’ technology knew had established, long-term employers, steadily with other people running in combination on a big scale. We had mutuals, social societies, sports activities and social and dealing males’s golf equipment.

What we provide my youngsters’s technology is cell running, the commodification of the whole thing, self-absorption and social isolation. Margaret Thatcher began the decay of mutual beef up and shared pursuits, and it has worsened during the last 14 years, so it isn’t a surprise that some see the expression of self‑pastime in delinquent behaviour and low-level illegal activity.
Andrew Kyle
Ealing, London

Jonathan Freedland means that Keir Starmer would possibly reproduction the populist gestures of Robert Jenrick. But Starmer has already indulged in lots of Freedland’s “nods to the right” together with his gimmicky video appearing the forcible deportation of asylum seekers, after which his Powellite “island of strangers” speech.

Better by means of a ways to “nod to the left” by means of copying Bernie Sanders (Interview, 4 June), together with his uncompromising opposition to all types of bigotry whilst advocating conventional social-democratic politics of robust welfare and simply redistribution. And closer house, Starmer may just concentrate to Gordon Brown (Opinion, 27 May) together with his passionate dedication to finishing youngster poverty, beginning with the unhesitating finish to the Tory two-child receive advantages cap.
Gideon Ben-Tovim
University of Liverpool

It is so distressing to search out that I’m inspired by means of the movements of a political candidate whom I generally despise. Jonathan Freedland is right kind, it’s this sort of petty lawbreaking that infuriates the ones folks who assume that as a society all of us wish to “play by the rules”.
But having Robert Jenrick (of all other people) level this out? Talk about cognitive dissonance.
Pat Downes
Bryneglwys, Denbighshire