Don’t try to mask your money sins

IN reply to JW Gray, the financial crash really started to show its teeth in 2007, three years before George Osborne became Chancellor but crucially in the middle of a 13-year term under Labour rule.

The cause of the crash was over-borrowing on wholesale money markets, a particular trait exemplified by our own disgraced Northern Rock board of directors.

Like Northern Rock, Labour borrowed billions on the nevernever on the basis the money tree would keep on giving if you shook the branches hard enough. Paying it back probably never crossed their minds.

To suggest Osborne was responsible in some way for the car crash is fanciful but to go on to claim that Brown left the economy on the up is plain delusional – may I remind you of the note left by Liam Byrne, Chief Secretary to the Treasury under Brown – “I’m afraid there is no money”. Crass by Byrne, but true.

The economy left by Brown was in fact in a worse state than that other bastion of socialist utopia Venezuela, a country lauded by those now leading the Labour Party but now on the verge of collapse.

Despite this, Brown airbrushed his role in the whole affair in his latest memoirs – the point of my recent letter.

As Mrs Thatcher famously said “the problem with socialism is you eventually run out of other people’s money.”

Time and again,socialist governments have over-spent and over-borrowed. History confirms this. ANDREW LAPPING Stocksfield