‘We had no one to speak for us’

• LABOUR Party leader Sir Keir Starmer’s recent opinion piece in The Observer newspaper has a remarkable resemblance to my letter you published in March, (Call it what it is, the great failure, March 11).

Indeed this week I happened to listen to his conference speech from April on YouTube, where you can hear snippets of the same.

You might be impressed by the 30,000 views he got on YouTube, but that does not match the 50,000 hits Jeremy Corbyn got for his first conference speech in 2017.

As your readers will see, however, the difference from what I wrote in March and what Sir Keir says now is that I did not stop at criticising the disastrous handling of the pandemic by the government but was highly critical of the failure of Sir Keir to offer any opposition at the time it was critically needed.

Rather he waits till now, in The Observer, when nobody is listening. When we needed courage he was found wanting.

Without an opposition, the country was left without a voice, without democracy. We had no one to speak for us.

We saw in recent local elections in Hartlepool that people found it hard to vote for… nothing.

Beer and flags were just insulting. Hounding the left out of the party is not a good electoral strategy.

The sun is in the sky and hope is rising, but let us not forget the dead.

As I finished my March letter: “So let’s have a great time when this [the pandemic] is over. But if our political leaders show up at our street parties, let’s run them off.”

DR PAUL O’BRIEN, NW5