Letter: National voices stifled by march of the market

A writer can only produce the kind of blast that Mr Ascherson is writing about if he has a constituency. Until 1989-91 he had the Old and New Left; even those vanished with the Soviet Union and Marxism. Nothing of substance survives.

When the next radical public is identifiable, the radical writer will re-appear. That public is actually surfacing, but at the hands of social and political inventors in the tradition of Michael Young, not of poets, playwrights or novelists. The focal points are community regeneration and public- private- voluntary partnerships. These are already well-grounded but, lacking national battalions, they are ignored. That will change. The Scots are showing the way, London is next.

Peter Cadogan

Kilburn 2000