Analysing the logic of a vote for the Labour party | Letters

Owen Jones seems to be unaware of the history of the party he urges everyone to vote for (The difference between Miliband and Cameron is a woman called Sue, 22 April). In the late 19th century there were two main political parties in the UK: the Tories who, as now, nakedly reflected the interests of the ruling class, and the Liberal party, whose establishment reformism received substantial support from recently enfranchised working-class (male) voters. The newly born Labour party - then called the Labour Representation Committee - won just two MPs in the 1900 election.

Of course, the Owen Joneses of the day would have argued that voting for the nascent Labour party, however unhappy one was with the Liberals, would split the anti-Tory vote. "An independent Labour organisation will not catch a single Tory vote. Such votes as it does carry away will be Liberal votes " it may hamstring and even cut the throat of the Liberal party", argued Lord Rosebery, then the Liberal prime minister, in 1894.

New Labour, in accommodating the worst excesses of neoliberalism, may be the author of its own electoral misfortune