The assorted Labour activists who write pleading with voters to re-elect Andrew Smith (Oxford Mail, April 23), despite the fact that they disagree with his support for the war in Iraq (and no doubt a few other key policies), are only fooling themselves.
A vote for Mr Smith, who has supported the Government on every occasion, is a mandate for Tony Blair and an endorsement of a policy manifesto which the Prime Minister described as 'quintessentially New Labour'.
I think it was journalist John Pilger who wrote that "the worst thing a Government can do is to take a country to war under false pretences". If anti-war Labour supporters are not going to break ranks over the thousands of innocent lives lost through Labour's intervention in Iraq, then it is difficult to imagine any circumstance under which they might.
They claim that improvements in social policy in the UK can somehow counterbalance the needless loss of life in Iraq, thereby justifing a Labour vote. I find this sickening.
As Pilger also wrote, by voting Labour you "will walk over the corpses of at least 100,000 people, most of them innocent women and children and the elderly, slaughtered by rapacious forces sent by Blair and Bush, unprovoked and in defiance of international law, to a defenceless country." CRAIG SIMMONS, Green Party, Magdalen Road, Oxford
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