I SYMPATHISE with those who say that the Labour Party have been wiped out in Scotland and are therefore an irrelevance to those who live here, but I cannot agree. We need a strong opposition in Westminster if we are to have any hope of controlling Boris’s excesses, working in committees, leading debates, working social media and proposing amendments to motions to clip his wings and finally supporting our call for self-governance.

There is no doubt that the Labour Party needs to reinvent itself before it will have any hope of electoral success, but just looking at its existing membership will not provide

the impetus needed. Those who did not support the Corbyn project and his style of leadership have left the party or are no longer active. The party executive must look much wider to solve its problems, to those who did NOT vote Labour, and find out why; not just those who “lent” their vote to Boris to “get Brexit done”, but also those in the middle ground, who long since abandoned the calls for centralised ownership of the economy and need to be persuaded that the extremes of the free market from the right and of nationalisation and state ownership on the left are not the answers to producing a healthy, modern economy.

We need a society where the best interests of all its members are delivered by cooperation and working together, not in conflict. Neither extreme will deliver that future.
Pete Rowberry
Duns