Sir, – Ed Brophy, Joan Burton's chief of staff during her term as tánaiste, ascribes Labour's poll collapse to participation in a Government that had no choice but to fix the public finances in haste ("Labour should aim for a decent society – and leave the tax cuts to others", Opinion & Analysis, May 30th).
In fact, Labour’s surge to 19 per cent in the 2011 general election owed a great deal to the party’s promise of “Labour’s way or Frankfurt’s way”, which was abandoned in government. Labour betrayed this commitment, even agreeing to repay over €3 billion to unsecured bondholders. Mr Brophy has conveniently forgotten this, but the electorate did not.
Mr Brophy also claims that Labour protected core social welfare payments while in government. In fact, the ESRI characterised all five of its budgets as regressive.
As minister for social welfare, Joan Burton cut all children’s allowances instead of stopping these payments to higher-income groups, again targeting the poorest sectors.
It is now routine for senior Labour figures to blame an ungrateful electorate for its poll collapse instead of looking to its own broken commitments. That is the diagnosis it needs to accept. – Yours, etc,
DONAL McGRATH,
Greystones,
Co Wicklow.
Sir, – Ed Brophy may well be engaging in the magical thinking that he accuses other political actors of because that is the type of thinking required to believe that Labour could somehow win votes away from rivals like the Social Democrats and Sinn Féin by pushing the social democratic agenda, while doing nothing to address the clear contradiction this presents when looking back at Labour’s time in office.
When Fianna Fáil can claim the moral high ground from Labour in terms of implementing relatively more progressive austerity budgets in government, when the Social Democrats and the Greens can equal Labour’s liberal ideology, and Sinn Féin can do more to claim the vote of the working class, relying on people to accept your narrative that another hypothetical government would have been even worse is not good enough.
Clearly, Labour has learned nothing. – Yours, etc,
TOMÁS M CREAMER,
Aughnasheelin,
Ballinamore,
Co Leitrim.