• YOUR contributor’s despair at how the Conservative’s misconceived programme of privatisation has facilitated so much of the UK’s basic infrastructure to be owned by other countries’ public energy and transport companies, is entirely understandable, (Sir Keir Starmer just hasn’t got it!, October 19).

As is the desperate call for change after the last 13 years of Tory misrule, wrecking our public services and diminishing so many lives.

But, contrary to Mr Reed’s opening claims, recognition of this need for change was the powerful theme, and unifying desire, of Labour’s Liverpool conference.

The government’s continued blind faith in free-markets and untested technologies is incapable of providing the green transition our futures depend upon.

Insecure, inequitable, and complacent, their broken ideology must be resisted effectively. It is then a question of means, not of aspiration, that seems to divide the rest of us.

Far from being a “puny new company”, soon to be sold off, Labour’s plans for publicly-owned GB Energy, has the potential to become an integral part in the creation of a new green infrastructure, along with a policy framework that gives private capital the confidence to commit the long-term investment to sit alongside it.

Here it should be both, and not either or, public and private investment, carefully deployed and derisked, working together, that will get us to where we need to be.

Given the self-evident failure of water and rail privatisation, absorbing ownership back into public control, as franchise contracts expire, has clear merits, being both popular and relatively more achievable than wholesale nationalisation of the energy sector.

Simplistic manifesto commitments promising instant renationalisation may feel good to read, but without credible, demonstrable, means of deliverability, they will not survive contact with the harsh realities of electoral campaigning, as seen (among other things…) in 2019, even when a more nuanced, incremental, process was what was actually being proposed.

To effect real change we must resist the despondency that destroys hope, stop lamenting lost pursuits of utopia, and exercise a pragmatic idealism that will build the shared future we so desperately need and want. That is taking back control!

JEF SMITH, NW5