SIR – Harold Wilson once said, “The Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing.”

After the events of the past week, Labour has lost every shred of moral authority and credibility.

Raging hysterically against the coalition’s plans to reform the welfare state, Labour politicians have ended up in the despicable position of defending the rotten, corrupt system that sustained mass child killer and serial sponger Mick Philpott.

Then a few days later, in a bid to recapture the ground they had lost through their indefensible stance over the Philpott case, they suddenly began talking tough on welfare, a dramatic contrast to the endless wailing about “Tory cuts”. But all their rhetoric, including threats to withdraw benefits from those who refuse to work, was utterly unconvincing.

If Labour really believed it, then the party would have supported welfare reform.

Labour’s stubborn opposition to any change in welfare represents a total betrayal of decent, hardworking people in Britain.

The party was founded to represent the interests of the working class, but it has ended up as the advocate of benefit cheats and the feckless, and no longer the party of the workers.

MR DALEBO

Worcester