LETTER : Labour will lose support if it sides with the super

So, "Labour may relax ban on out-of-town shopping centres" (28 April), might it?

Well, it might just think again.

I'm Labour. Been in it for more than 25 years. Through thin and thin. The whole family born into it in Manchester and Salford. And a committed supporter of "new" Labour, too. But there is a limit beyond which the Blair-Brown-Harman version cannot go without finding itself a political faction without the Labour movement behind it.

We will tolerate a rich upper-middle-class leadership but not one which takes child benefit from the poor rather than risk offending their own. We will tolerate an urban political elite which takes holidays in Tuscany but not one which is prepared to sacrifice the only countryside we have, which we happen to love passionately, to please the car lobby and the retail business.

We are prepared to put up with a great deal from the Blair-Brown-Harman faction in order to rid the country of the immeasurable evil of Toryism. But there are limits. They may find to their dismay that we will not vote or work for what we simply cannot believe in or what might begin to be the very thing we hoped to replace. Blair beware.

Michael Knowles

Congleton, Cheshire