Ground zero
Sir: James Forsyth looks for hope for moderates within the Labour party and finds none (‘The party’s over’, 24 September). That is because the most promising source of hope for them is not a change of position by Labour, but one by the Conservatives.
The history of British politics since 1990 has been a prolonged fight for the centre ground. This isn’t because that’s where either party naturally wants to be, but because that’s where the votes are.
With Corbyn’s renewed mandate, Labour have unilaterally ceded that ground. The Conservatives could, as Forsyth suggests, use the opportunity to dig themselves in there so firmly that Labour will never recover it. But are the Conservatives not as vulnerable to their activist membership dragging them to the right as Labour was vulnerable to the left? With the pressure to contest the centre ground removed, we are just as likely to see a Tory party ruled more by its right-wing members than by its centrist MPs.
Thomas Cook
Farmborough, Somerset
Growing apart
Sir: Martin Vander Weyer is right: ‘the north’ would let out a cheer if HS3 were approved and quietly ignore the disappearance of HS2 (Any other business, 17 September). I spent many years in Japan’s second city, Osaka, where one of my activities was to support their mayor’s work to improve the international attractiveness of the city to foreign business. The problem was that every major Osaka-based company’s head-office functions had been drained away to Tokyo. The ‘bullet train’ linking the cities in about two-and-a-half hours encouraged this, because it made it convenient to keep in touch but leave the ‘old base’ behind. It had a snowballing effect as one major head office after another moved out.
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