August 14: Sense and nonsense in Sir Bernard Ingham’s mixed grill

MY pen friend and lost young socialist comrade Sir Bernard Ingham offers a mixed grill of sense and nonsense in his attack on Jeremy Corbyn (The Yorkshire Post, August 5). Yes, the heavy industrial trade unions that had freed underdog workers from subsidence living had turned into “Alsatians”, but this doesn’t mean that miners should earn less than stockbrokers. But lasting change requires hearts as well as conflicts to be won.

Your columnist is mistaken, however, in saying that “the Government does not have a penny of its own”. It all comes out of your pockets. A small proportion of money is still “minted” by the Treasury, which in 1914 issued “Bradburys” to meet the run on the banks when the war broke out. Alas, the responsibility to create money “to oil the wheels of commerce” has long since been handed to a financial services – or rather predation– industry.

It is the Cameron government which has failed to curtail the deficit, preferring to benefit the very rich. Responsible workers can’t just follow Orwell’s “Boxer the horse”, whose answer to all problems was “I must work harder”, for the price of liberty is eternal vigilance and energy must be found for co-operating to get an optional social framework.

From: Phil Hanson, Beechmount Close, Baildon.

LAST week saw a reprise of The Rocky Horror Show, at the same time as Labour supporters appear to be getting behind Jeremy Corbyn!

These two events are linked by a desire to go down memory lane; whilst the RHS is fantastic cult entertainment, the site of students with no idea of the harm that old Labour bestowed on Britain accompanied by the usual suspects selling Socialist Worker is a worry to anyone who can remember the 1960s and 70s.

In the socialist days of Wilson and Co, Britain was in danger of being run by the political agenda of the left wing unions, products and services were diabolical and many workers felt the world owed them a job and a living!

Anyone with any doubt about how much better off we are these days in a free market economy need look no further than the humble telephone.

In the old days, you had only one supplier, a sparse choice of phones, lousy service that meant waiting all day for an engineer to come to plug in the phone. Young people should not be swept up in an ideology that simply does not work. Socialism is long dead and buried and Corbyn may prove to be the end of Labour if elected.