WHEN one’s political opponents plumb the depths of sarcasm and derision, with vacuous generalising rhetoric trumping any semblance of rational argument, it will be clear to fair-minded readers that they have already comprehensively lost the argument.

First, in his cloud-cuckoo-land political analysis, Tom Newman (“Labour woes”, November 9) achieves the improbable feat of saying little of any substance in his mini-essay of a letter.

His attempts to draw parallels between Jeremy Corbyn and Michael Foot are based on a simplistic and patently false historical analysis and he also expects readers to believe his fear-saturated narrative about there being up to half a million Labour Party members of the “extreme hard left”.

As usual, all the political right has to offer is smears and fear-mongering.

With regard to public support for proportional representation, Francis Ray (“Devoted fans”, November 16) erroneously claims that it is only supported by a small minority. Wrong.

The latest national opinion poll on the issue shows the very opposite, with 57 per cent of the public agreeing with the principle that “the number of seats a party gets should broadly reflect its proportion of the total votes cast”, compared to only nine per cent who disagreed.

And one wonders what planet Francis has been living on in claiming that the first-past-the-post system has “served the country well” – under the elective dictatorships of Blair and the Conservatives, voted into absolute power by less than a quarter of the registered voters.

These are the data of a banana republic, not of a mature representative democracy.

Notwithstanding the protestations of the likes of Tom Newman, anti-Labour readers are going to have to put up with the political truth-telling of myself and others until Britain has a genuinely progressive government.

Not satisfied with their near monopoly of the national print media, the political right also seem to want to control the letters pages of the local press, too.

They just can’t bear the fact that cogent people from the left are given the opportunity to expose the unethical, class-ridden nature of Conservative policies in local newspapers and fairly to outline Corbyn’s ethical alternative in a way that right-wing propaganda sheets never would.

If opponents feel so exercised by our challenges, why don’t more of them engage with us in head-to-head dialogue?

They don’t because they’re simply “frit” to so engage when they know their arguments to be threadbare and that their political opponents will wipe the floor with them in any fair and open debate.

DR RICHARD HOUSE

Stroud