IAIN MacWhirter (“Party over if Labour try to ban socialists”, The Herald, July 28) is absolutely right.

It’s amazing hypocrisy for acting leader Harriet Harman to talk about banning “entryists” who don’t hold “Labour aims and values” from voting in the leadership election when she’s part of the New Labour entryist group which adopted Conservative party policies including PFIs and privatisation. New Labour also shadowed the United States on foreign policy, which led to the Iraq and Afghanistan disasters, the strengthening of Al Qa’ida and the rise of Islamic State.

The thing that lost Labour most votes was the banking crisis, the result of New Labour adopting the Conservatives’ deregulation policy. Tony Blair would have lost that election if he’d stayed leader too , which is why he resigned when he did. It was failed New Labour policy, not just Gordon Brown’s personality. Ms Harman and three of the four leadership candidates backed that policy too – and still do.

They wouldn’t even vote against the Tories’ latest round of welfare cuts targeting the poorest and most vulnerable. And they have the gall to talk about others not upholding Labour aims and values?

Jeremy Corbyn is the only candidate for Labour leader who has consistently opposed Conservative policies and yet there are suggestions of banning many people, who used to support the Labour Party, and would again under Mr Corbyn, from voting, in case they vote for him.

New Labour is now not only a moral failure but an electoral one. It’s a political dinosaur. But the Blairites still want to maintain the same failed strategy of adopting more Tory policies and apologising to Tory voters for not being enough like the Tories, while promising to be more like them in future.

Ed Miliband’s campaign was weak, but not left wing. And he lost as much because of the Lib Dems’ support collapsing due to Nick Clegg’s tuition fees betrayal as anything Labour did.

Mr Corbyn is the only candidate for Labour leader who could get Labour back the millions of voters who have since voted for other parties or stopped voting at all.

Duncan McFarlane,

Beanshields, Braidwood, Carluke.

IN recent days we have heard a succession of Labour grandees and other sundry political commentators tell us that Labour “cannot win from the left”. Already the air is thick with talk of a new leadership election should Jeremy Corbyn win under the system championed by the Blairite wing of the party.

First, it speaks volumes about the integrity of these people that they speak of a coup or a split if they do not get the leader they seek. Whatever one may think of Hugh Gaitskell's politics, he had least had the political courage to “fight, fight and fight again”, rather than running to seek refuge in either a new party or in the arms of former political opponents.

Secondly, if we look at the figures from 2010 and 2015 we see that in 2015 Labour increased its share of the vote by 1.4 per cent from 2010, compared to a Conservative increase of 0.8 per cent. It was the marginals that won it, for David Cameron, not a wholesale conversion to conservatism or austerity.

Thirdly, it is accepted that Scotland became increasingly politicised due to the referendum and the unleashing of debate about the direction of both Scotland and the UK as a whole.

There was an anti-austerity platform being offered in Scotland by the SNP - who as we know won 56 of the seats. Another interesting fact however is that if we look at overall UK turnout in May 2015 the three highest turnouts were in Scottish constituencies - East Dunbartonshire, East Renfrewshire and Stirling and Scottish constituencies provided seven of the 10 highest turnouts in the UK and 19 of the 40 highest turnouts. Of the 40 lowest turnouts only one of these was a Scottish constituency - Glasgow Central at 55.4 per cent, a mere 0.3 per cent less than the turnout in Mr Miliband's seat of Doncaster North.

These figures, in an area where turnout has traditionally been lower than the UK average would seem to me to indicate that there is an electorate out there wanting to vote and willing to do so when an alternative to the overriding narrative is offered.

John McArthur,

131 Crowhill Street , Glasgow.