Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer

• BENEATH the headline “Factionalism erodes trust in party”, it was almost funny (yet actually tragic) to read a letter that was itself so factionalist, (August 4).

Its signatories urged the officers of the Holborn and St Pancras Labour Party to “see themselves as local examples of the factionalist behaviour that the Forde Report condemns”.

Unfortunately, factionalism has characterised both “wings” of the Labour Party nationally, as locally. However to devote a long letter to an account of voting behaviour concerning the Forde Report at the recent General Committee (GC) is extraordinarily inwardly turned and self-referential and surely cannot mesh with the main concerns of most of the citizens of Camden and neighbouring parts of the constituency.

As I was away I did not attend this GC and therefore, thankfully, did not have to vote, as I should have been unable to summon up any sympathy for either side.

Labour Party members should be asking themselves why the party is only just ahead of a collapsing Tory party in the polls. They should be seeking points of agreement across what is, I know, an entrenched divide.

As things stand all this letter signals to me is a narcissistic form of gestural politics confronted by a retreat into timid conservatism and the oxymoronic notion of “making Brexit work”.

ELIZABETH WILSON
Address supplied