As usual John Harris provides thoughtful testimony to Labour’s difficulties in working-class areas of the Midlands and north (The ‘red wall’ is looking shaky. But the rot set in years ago, Journal, 2 December).

However, he doesn’t explicitly engage with the paradox inherent in the “estrangements” he describes. On the one hand, older leavers are “bitterly dismissive of Jeremy Corbyn”; on the other, the reasons for Labour’s current weakness in these areas “stretch back decades”. The main factor there is the alleged neglect of post-industrial communities by New Labour. Yet the whole point of Corbynism is to rectify that neglect, in other words to restore the values and the contract of Old Labour.

Brexit is of course a salient issue, but everyone knows that Corbyn is more sympathetic to Brexit than the architects of New Labour were and are. So that bitter dismissal of Corbyn has other grounds, primarily the view that he doesn’t share a nationalism rooted in the second world war myths of Britain standing alone and single-handedly rescuing the rest of Europe from Nazi domination. These still-popular myths help to explain why regions of Britain that have benefited more than most from EU subsidy still reject the European idea.

One fears that “getting Brexit done” will only solidify such myths and widen the gulf between their adherents and advocates of a more progressive politics.

Richard Allen

Cambridge

• John Harris’s report from “the old Nottinghamshire coalfields” raises dark memories from 35 years ago.The strike that Arthur Scargill led in 1984-85 (during which I lived across the road from the Yorkshire NUM headquarters) may feel like ancient history, but the divisions it created among Britain’s miners have some strong parallels with what has happened during the Tory-led project to leave the EU.

There were regional divisions, notoriously between Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, which shared a common border. There were also deep rifts within families and local communities where some of the wounds have yet to heal.

The lesson from that era may be that the chances of particular ways of ending the Brexit agony through an election campaign, let alone over the next five years, may be pretty slim. Scargill, who tried to “picket out Nottinghamshire”, and David Cameron, who made a hash of solving his party’s problems, may have left equally dismal and long-lasting legacies.

Geoff Reid

Bradford

• John Harris sets out the deeper changes in British politics that have evolved over at least the past decade but he fails to identify why it has happened. The key cause lies at the door of the Labour party, which depended on class-based politics and took for granted that working-class electors would always vote Labour simply because they had nowhere else to go.

Increasingly in recent years, many of these electors’ views were well to the right of those of the Labour party, but it failed to confront them, believing that as long as they continued to vote Labour, why disturb them? They were certainly unlikely to vote Conservative, but along came Ukip – and the SNP in Scotland – which chimed with their views and provided a more acceptable escape route.

Having thus been prised away from Labour, they have not returned and the party is now paying the price for its complacency.

Michael Meadowcroft

Leeds

• “Do not blame the voters,” writes John Harris. Sorry John, that’s just patronising claptrap.

If the British electorate do not have the sense to see that returning a Johnson government will be bad news for the country and the great majority of people who live in it, then I’m afraid that in the event of a Tory victory and its inevitable dire consequences they will indeed have only themselves to blame.

Alan Gardiner

Birkenhead, Merseyside

• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com

• Read more Guardian letters – click here to visit gu.com/letters

• Do you have a photo you’d like to share with Guardian readers? Click here to upload it and we’ll publish the best submissions in the letters spread of our print edition