I’ve been a Labour voter for over 40 years and I’ve just been rejected by the party as a supporter. They don’t want me to vote in the leadership election and I have no idea why. My time spent scanning the rival manifestos has been wasted, my enthusiasm for this opening up of democracy dashed (Labour election process: the answer to Corbynmania is politics, not the law, 24 August). The email telling me this reads: “We have reason to believe that you do not support the aims and values of the Labour party or you are a supporter of an organisation opposed to the Labour party.” No reason is given for this assertion and there is no possibility of finding out what information, gossip or hearsay has led to the decision. And they don’t offer to return the £3 either.

I’m interested in my psychological reaction, however: feelings of anxiety, a nervous racking of my brain for what the possible offence could be, a strange untethered guilt as I wonder what I could have done to deserve this response – feelings all too familiar to East Germans accused by anonymous neighbours of some unspecified offence or Americans caught up in the ravages of McCarthyism. I don’t really wish to compare the Labour party to a police state but it does seem to share a similar paranoia, accusing innocent people in unspecified ways of unspecified offences and offering no explanation or possibility of appeal.

Rosemary Randall

Cambridge

• I have been hearing Harriet Harman making claims that the scrutiny of the people registered to vote in the leadership election was proper and within the party rules. The argument was that the rejected applicants had been found to have commitments to other parties and therefore could not be allowed to choose a Labour party leader. I was hoping that someone would point out that in the time of Tony Blair, Shaun Woodward, a multimillionaire Tory MP, crossed over to the Labour benches and was accepted with open arms. Gordon Brown made him the secretary of state for Northern Ireland. Later he was parachuted into the St Helen’s safe labour seat, an area he had never visited in his life and undoubtedly to the dismay of many of the local constituents. If a man who had always been a staunch Tory could be trusted to become a Labour supporter overnight, then why can’t the few Tories and the rest of the voters rejected by Harman be given the benefit of the doubt to vote for the leader?

Sushma Lal

Ystrad Meurig, Ceredigion

• One or two letters which have appeared in the Guardian regarding the Labour party leadership campaign were from those much involved in far left extremism within the party in the early 1980s. They and a few other correspondents have referred to being socialist, but this requires some definition.

I have been virtually all my life a democratic socialist, committed to a much fairer society, and reducing the vast concentration of private wealth among so few. However, I am no less committed to the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, and civil liberties.

There has not been a single Marxist state where such freedom has ever existed, and that includes present-day Cuba. Some of the worst tyrants, such as Lenin, Mao Zedong and, for that matter, the present murderous dictator of North Korea, all stated their dedication to socialism. That form of “socialism” is as repulsive as fascism or military dictatorships.

David Winnick MP

Labour, Walsall North

• Please advise Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the PCS, that you cannot be purged when you are not in any category of Labour party membership in the first place (Report, 26 August). If Serwotka is not to be seen as hypocritical, I challenge him to introduce a rule change which will enable supporters to vote in the leadership election of the PCS by paying £3 and stating they support the aims and objectives of the trade union movement. As a Labour party member of 30 years standing, I resent the rule changes which enabled our former detractors such as Serwotka and middle-class pseudo-revolutionaries such as Mark Steel and Jeremy Hardy from having a say in who leads us.

Colin Adkins

Wrexham

• Banning people who previously supported the Greens when there was no Labour representative they could relate to, who are now enthused by Labour because they have someone representing their interests in Jeremy Corbyn, is against the party’s long-term interests and negates the fact that the Greens share a lot of Corbyn’s ideas and values. What exactly are the Green policies that go against Labour’s aims and values?

Either Labour welcomes these people or they will vote against Labour at the next election. It doesn’t make sense. Does this mean that after this internal election anyone who has supported another party in the past cannot change to Labour? There are conflicting reports of what is acceptable in the press and this really needs to be clarified.

Mora McIntyre

Hove, East Sussex

• My mother-in-law, Win Francis, who has reached the ripe old age of 90 because of the hundreds of miles she has walked delivering leaflets for the Labour party, has just been informed she has been barred from voting, with no reason given.

She joined the Labour party in the 1960s and spent the next decades until she was in her eighties working night and day for the party. The local MP, who did not live in the constituency, stayed at her house when not in London and she was the mainstay in her local ward in Sheffield. She left the Labour party in recent years but has never joined any other party.

Gwyneth Francis

Glossop, Derbyshire

• Loud cheers to reports that the Labour party will be checking internal canvass data of suspect applicants trying to take part in our party leadership contest. The constituency I represent in parliament is a large, semi-rural one in north Wales. It is certainly not the sort of place where one would expect to find infiltrators. Yet even here a quick 30-second glance at one list of names revealed a dozen non-Labour people, including two Tory hunters, a former parliamentary candidate for another party and two people who have recently featured on other parties’ literature. If this has been happening here, heaven knows what it must be like in populous, urban areas.

We would not dream of adopting a £3 sign-up system for instant access votes to select council, parliamentary or Welsh assembly candidates. But if we have to have this system for selecting our leader, then it is vital that serious checks are made.

Susan Elan Jones MP

Labour, Clwyd South

• I am a trade union member, and as my trade union is affiliated to the Labour party, I was told I would have a vote in the leadership election. The other day I was sent an online ballot and I cast my vote for Jeremy Corbyn to become the next leader. Today I have received an email from the Labour party saying: “We have reason to believe that you do not support the aims and values of the Labour party or you are a supporter of an organisation opposed to the Labour party and therefore we are rejecting your application.”

I am an ex member of the Labour party – I was a member for a period in the early 1980s and again in the late 1990s until 2006. I have only ever voted Labour in parliamentary elections and the only times I have not put my “x” against the Labour candidate’s name on a ballot paper was in last year’s and this year’s council elections when I voted Green because my son was standing as a Green candidate (I voted Labour in the general election).

Richard Houghton

Preston, Lancashire

• I will confess in public – in 1964, aged 10, I and several others from my junior school delivered leaflets for Mr Pratt, our music teacher. I didn’t look at them until the last one – they were for his Conservative parliamentary seat campaign. I got 7s 6d for this (for the benefit of our wonderful world commodity traders, that was 15 Lucky Bags at 1964 prices).

Jonathan Hauxwell

Crosshills, North Yorkshire