HAVING grown up in a divided Germany I can certainly testify to Alma Geddin’s assessment of a dismal picture of socialism gone mad (letter published September 13).

My parents managed to flee to the western part where we grew up.

All my relatives remained in the eastern communist part.

We visited them each year but they were not allowed to visit us until they reached retirement (when they were no longer useful to the state!).

What I question however, is drawing the conclusion that all socialist ideas are doomed to failure.

When my siblings and I came of age we equally came to question the materialistic values of the western economic system.

Is it not high time that we let go of this binary thinking once and for all and especially when it comes to politics?

The medieval picture of Government and Opposition in the House of Commons sitting a sword-and-a-half length apart from one another to ensure they don’t kill each other immediately, speaks volumes.

That this approach still informs politics today is all the more shameful.

Both the capitalist and socialist approach have become heartless, which is not to deny that both of them have something really positive to bring in the right context.

What prevents this coming to expression is the ‘either/or’ thinking which is exemplified by the party whip in parliament who forces MPs to forgo their own consciences in favour of the party line.

I have been deeply moved by Ben Okri’s powerful eulogy to the victims of Grenfell tower. It ends with these words: “In this age of austerity the poor die for others’ prosperity.

Nurseries and libraries fade from the land.

A strange time is shaping on the strand.

A sword of fate hangs over the deafness of power.

See the tower, and let a new world changing thought flower.”

We need urgently to move beyond our current mode of being that has become hardened and increasingly de-humanised.

We really do need a ‘politics of the heart’ that transcends all parties.

Karin Jarman

Stroud