IF JEREMY Corbyn had not allowed a free vote on bombing Syria resignations from the shadow cabinet would have settled the reshuffle for him; and Cameron would not have put it to a vote he would have lost.

Hilary Benn has subsequently said that Labour must move on from Iraq but how is that possible when Saddam Hussein's army forms the core of Isis/Isal forces?

Instead of using his landslide victory to reform education, welfare and taxation Tony Blair made the disastrous choice to strut the world stage by clinging to America's coat tails, in great contrast to Harold Wilson's stand against involvement in that earlier calamitous American foreign policy disaster of Vietnam.

Now Cameron compounds the disaster of his foreign policy in the Middle East by bombing Syria while simultaneously kowtowing to Saudi Arabia for the sake of cheap oil and arms sales, in total contradiction of the destruction of that other Sunni state - Iraq - the most secular state in the middle east until Saddam Hussein turned to radical Islamists in a bid to avoid defeat.

Iraq's oil supplies may well have been a factor in the illegal invasion but fracking means that America no longer needs oil from the Middle East in the way that we do, thanks to Cameron's ditching of solar power.

Now the Saudi execution of a Shia cleric has enraged Iran to the extent that a peaceful solution of the Syrian civil war is an even more forlorn hope, while we avert our eyes from drowned children and the thousands of unaccompanied children tramping through the freezing mud of Europe in their attempt to flee the bombing of their homeland.

Demoted Labour MPs, like Pat McFadden, and his supporters, including our MP Stephen Doughty, who has now resigned from Labour's front bench, should bear in mind that Corbyn's landslide victory as Labour leader was the result of an overwhelming desire on the part of the membership to reconnect the party with those it is there to represent: the under educated, under skilled, under paid underclass who are the foundations of our pyramid of consumerism that is all our economy amounts to since New Labour's failure to rebuild our manufacturing base destroyed by Thatcher.

They should concentrate their attack on Osborne's floundering attempt to run a budget surplus that is as wrong headed as Churchill's return to the gold standard, and will have the same disastrous consequences of a massive economic slump, for which he is now trying to blame external factors when the truth is that his austerity policy is as badly holed below the water line as the flood defences of our northern cities that have been so catastrophically damaged by his cuts to local government.

All he can offer for another five years is blood, sweat, toil and tears.

Margaret Phelps

Raisdale Gardens

Penarth