MADAM – To those who think of tactically voting, I’d like to say why I can’t do that anymore.

Solidarity once meant aligning with the exploited, the underpaid and the excluded.

To the last Labour government, the cyborgs in suits whose administration our ex-Labour MP supported, it meant keeping faith with the banks, the corporate press, public cuts, a tollbooth economy – market fundamentalism.

So very far from its roots.

Labour in office voted for the Iraq war, for Trident, for 3,500 new criminal offences – including the criminalisation of most forms of peaceful protest.

In office, Labour boasted of setting the lowest rate of corporation tax in British history and then failed to stop corporations avoiding even that. After 13 years in office, we had higher rates of inequality than after the preceding 18 years of the Tories.

The Labour government colluded in kidnapping and torture and helped cause the deaths and injury of hundreds of thousands in an illegal war. They marketised and dismembered public services, enriched the wealthy, and failed the poor.

Pledging money for Trident, we witnessed the continued disastrous sale of council housing while the bedroom tax for private tenants was introduced.

And the private finance initiatives Labour planted through the NHS and other public services are now exploding with catastrophic consequences.

If Martin Large and others want social and environmental justice, it’s time they voted for it. The problem with voting for David Drew is you get the Labour Party.

Clare Hudman

Uplands