Labour is being led into a trap, from which it may never escape to win another election

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The same leaders who led Labour into the elephant trap, are now leading the party into a woolly mammoth trap, from which it may never escape to win another election. They are the trap – if the “continuity Corbyn” leader they are promoting is elected and their ideologies and policies continue to enmesh the party, how is Labour ever going to climb back into an electable proposition?

This country needs a Labour party with a strong leader who is relentlessly focused on winning and reversing the damage done.

Jack Whiteside
Swindon, Wiltshire

Coronavirus monster

Jimmy Smith is right that the coronavirus is a monster that is wreaking havoc on colossal scale and requires a holistic approach. Also, the concept of resilience in the health systems and policies discourse has gained central importance.

It is time to underpin the ability of health systems to adapt and be transformative to changes and remain stable and thrive. Resilience should not be prescriptive but have breadth and flexibility and be inclusive of different experiences and anticipative of cultural and religious fault lines.

Dr Munjed Farid Al Qutob
London

Passport madness

Does all the jubilation over the “return” of the blue passport reveal that the nation, has, collectively, completely lost it? I just stumbled on some old passports, and they’re black. And they stay black, even when a blue light is shone on them. Is our grasping at this fiction confirmation that, in Cummings’ dystopian Britain, nothing matters and there are no values? Ah well, I guess it proves Baudrillard was on the nail. Pity, really.

Michael Rosenthal
Ferndale, Banbury

Free from what?

Euphoria never lasts long. We are out of the EU, so that was great for a week or two. What next? Let’s be totally free. Free from control by civil servants, by the judiciary, by any constraints in any trade deal, by independent broadcasters. We have exercised our democratic right to be free. We can do exactly what we like. Well, not quite.

We are at the mercy of what everyone else wants, a very small fish in a very big pond full of bigger fish with big appetites. The only way to get exactly what we want is to want nothing. So let’s sit back and watch the government get the power it craves while we get nothing for five years – 10 if we continue to divide the opposition vote between two political parties.

Jon Hawksley
London

Exams fit for the 21st century

Eleanor Busby’s analysis of the Welsh qualification watchdog’s proposal to introduce electronic exams fails to address the important issue that exam boards are still shying away from – giving students access to the internet while doing an electronic exam, even though this is available while learning and in any career. This would focus students on how to gather useful knowledge and use it in practise, while also being critical of what they find on the internet. As a teacher, I have felt for many years that exam boards are not creating assessments fit for the 21st century which encourage these useful skills.

Kartar Uppal
Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands

A brief taste of freedom

This brief escape was probably the first time these baboons had experienced freedom in their entire lives (”Baboons on loose after escaping medical research facility“). Hundreds of monkeys are bred and used for experiments in Australia every year. They may be poisoned, cut open, electrocuted, or infected with deadly diseases in barren, windowless prisons.

There are three federally funded facilities that breed primates for experiments in that country, including the one that these monkeys are from, yet there’s nowhere for the animals to be retired to once they’re no longer useful to experimenters. Primates who are born in Australian breeding facilities will ultimately die in a laboratory. Peta Australia stands ready to help give these baboons a proper retirement at a sanctuary.

Dr Julia Baines
Science Policy Adviser, Peta Foundation, London