In your editorial (18 January) you argue that if the trade unions wanted a "pliant" leader of the Labour party they should have backed me and "watched as Labour sank with all hands". Actually, if we are to pursue naval metaphors, I feel more like the coastguard official seeing the captain jump overboard and urging him to have courage, get back on his ship and start leading.
My only response so far to Ed Balls and Ed Miliband's acceptance of Cameron's cuts and pay-freeze policies has been to express the overwhelming disappointment that so many Labour supporters feel. The economic crisis is a game-changer. For Labour leaders to react to it by supporting the same old failed economic orthodoxies, which mean ordinary people will pay for the crisis, is such a crushing disappointment.
Just as the welfare state was a radical response to the 1930s depression, there is a vital opportunity now to challenge our corrupt and incompetent economic system and to give people the possibility of opening up a new era in how we organise our society. That means having the courage to demand a radical redistribution of wealth, insisting on democratic control of our economy at every level from the firm to the City, exposing to eradicate inequality in all its forms and recognising that if environmental sustainability is not at the core of our worldview, everything we plan will become irrelevant anyway.
Instead of trailing the coalition, we could be leading an exciting new movement for change. Even in crude electoral terms, the message is don't try and slug it out with the Tories on their own terrain as they will always win. Instead be brave and create your own ground on which to fight.
John McDonnell MP
Labour, Hayes and Harlington
• The Guardian is of course much bigger than some of your more recent editorials. These have graduated from confused enthusiasm for the Liberal Democrats at the last general election – "If the Guardian had a vote it would be cast enthusiastically for the Liberal Democrats" – to this week's totemic editorial headed "Labour party: battling the bosses".
On closer inspection the battle to which your editorial referred was not with the corporate vultures, the unaccountable and unelected bosses who have brought the economy to its knees, but to elected trade union leaders. What followed could just have easily appeared as a leader in the Daily Telegraph.
The trade unions who are affiliated to the Labour party, many of whose members voted for Ed Miliband and who pay a political levy, are perfectly entitled to speak out against the party's lurch back towards economic orthodoxy. Especially as they weren't consulted over the shadow cabinet's unimaginative and ultimately futile attempt to triangulate its economic policy in the direction of the government.
For over a quarter of a century, the British Labour party, and many of its sister parties in Europe, have moved closer and closer to the neoliberal economic orthodoxy that is responsible for our current predicament. This goes a long way to explain the crisis in British and European social democracy, and the fact that there is now only one left leaning European party actually in power – in Denmark. No amount of references to the new "oxymoron" that is "responsible capitalism" will persuade the increasing numbers of the disfranchised that the political class in Britain and Europe are any longer capable of fleshing out a real alternative.
The Guardian is plain wrong. There are no winners from this Blairite-inspired lurch to the right. There are only losers. Hopefully the two Eds – Miliband and Balls – can seek some inspiration from the far more progressive global economic agenda that is emerging from, among others, Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general.
Labour still has time to build a progressive economic alternative, before others, including the trade unions and the Scottish nationalists – who many increasingly see as the most potent opposition to the Tory-led coalition – decide to take on that task.
Mark Seddon
Former editor, Tribune; former member of Labour party NEC