I’M PLEASED that my letter of October 7, has provoked some responses from the political right – all the more opportunity to lay bear their threadbare position.

Ralph Kenber (letters, October 21) clearly has a very warped perspective of what a genuine “democracy” should consist of.

Of course we can quibble about definitions, but in my book and millions of others, democracy is most certainly not an “elected dictatorship” (Conservative or Labour) that has absolute power for five years, that less than one in four of the electorate voted for, and which manipulated its way to power through carefully calculated lies, backed up by an appallingly biased print-media propaganda campaign.

I can’t wait for a Corbyn-led government to address Britain’s massive democratic deficit, through taking on our non-dom concentration of press ownership and reforming our discredited electoral system.

Francis Ray does little in his letter (October 21) other than make vague assertions about the far left, without any substantiating arguments.

Britain has been subjected to neo-liberal policies for nearly 40 years – and all we have to show for it is the poorest being driven into the ground by weakening collective bargaining power, creating the largest low-wage economy in Europe by making subsistent benefits ever harder to claim; people’s quality of life and work/life balance relentlessly denuded; and a Pontius Pilate government which allows well unionised industries to disintegrate as a deliberate strategy (in the current case, our steel industry), no matter what the cost to the real economy and our industrial base.

This is industrial vandalism – no less.

The Canadian people have just rejected back-woods Conservatism at the polls, and have enthusiastically embraced anti-austerity; and Britain will do the same in 2020.

Dr Richard House

Stroud