Ken Loach's article (Labour is not the solution, 28 March) has received a fantastic response – 250 people joined Left Unity over the weekend, when we held our first national conference.

But Labour supporters would rather see us pack up our things and go home. They tell us not to rock the boat for fear of letting the Tories in next year. New Labour was founded on the assumption that Labour could tack as far as it liked to the right and still count on the left vote for lack of an alternative. And tack right it did. Now we have a Labour party signed up to Conservative spending plans, privatisation and a benefits cap that will hit disabled people hard and push 345,000 children into poverty. And whatever you do, don't mention the (Iraq) war.

Left Unity's conference in Manchester on Saturday agreed to campaign against austerity and war, to introduce a 35-hour week and a mandatory living wage, and to renationalise the rail and energy companies. These are policies that the vast majority of British people support but Labour, ever in the pockets of big business, will not even consider them. What does this say about the Labour party today? What does it say about the state of British democracy? This is exactly why we need Left Unity.

Salman Shaheen

Principal speaker, Left Unity

• As every year passes, the influence of the left in the Labour party diminishes; it's almost non-existent now. In 1994, Ralph Miliband wrote in Socialism for a Sceptical Age: "The emergence of new socialist parties in many countries is one of the notable features of the present time … their growth is essential if the left is to prosper."

The parties Ralph Miliband was referring to have developed into the Party of the European Left, an alliance of left parties in European countries. Opinion polls indicate that those parties, which have a clear policy of opposing austerity and privatisation, and which support the re-founding of Europe on a socialist basis, will get increased support in the forthcoming European elections. Syriza in Greece has 23.9% support, Izquierda Unida in Spain 14.1%, Front de Gauche in France 9% and Die Link in Germany 8%.

In Britain we have no opportunity of voting for such a party. Left Unity's conference agreed to support the Party of the European Left's call for a refounding of Europe on a socialist basis. For socialists in the Labour party there is an alternative – Left Unity.

David Melvin

Ashton-under-Lyne, Greater Manchester

• In threatening to split Unite from Labour (Back workers or lose election, Miliband told, 2 April), my friend Len McCluskey would be sadly destined to repeat history. Small splinter left parties in Britain have never succeeded, only played into the hands of the Tories by dividing their opponents and undermining the ability of Labour – the only party capable of forming an alternative government – to win. Far too many of my constituents, like many others, are being devastated by this Tory-Lib Dem government and are desperate to defeat them.

Peter Hain MP

Lab, Neath

• Deborah Orr wrote a very interesting article (Workers are treated with contempt in Britain. This should be Labour's focus, 29 March), which, if I read her right, called for what at one time was described as a "middle way" between adherence to the state and reliance on the market. Leave aside the fact that her knock at New Labour may well have been misplaced (I do not believe for a moment that the Brown government was defeated in 2010 because it was New Labour), and it is possible to see that the critique she offers has been debated for the past 30 years. The battle lines of the 1980s were about a throwback to Friedrich Hayek and the "liberated individual" of Margaret Thatcher's free-market values, and old Labour with its paternalistic, top-down approach to solving genuine problems.

The question that Orr did not answer is how you mobilise the power of people in their own lives with the influence of the state to tackle vested interests, from wherever they come, and to unite people against such vested interests across national boundaries in a rapidly developing global power struggle. The truism that all of us have to address in politics is: "Those who have power are those most likely to be in power."

David Blunkett MP

Lab, Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough