Tory austerity is causing misery

Sir,

Conservative Councillor Alastair Redman claims ‘rural Argyll is being sidelined by the SNP’ (Letters, The Oban Times, November 23).

Like the Christmas turkey, Councillor Redman has got some neck. The leading independent financial think tank, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, has recently predicted austerity and wage stagnation are set to continue for at least a decade, and perhaps for as long as 20 more years.

Workers will earn less in 2022 than they did in 2008. Public sector workers who have waited seven years for a pay rise will have to wait for at least 10 more, possibly 20.

There are still £12 billion in cuts to welfare to come from the Tory government. George Osborne promised a budget surplus of £10 billion in 2019-2020, but now Philip Hammond has admitted that the deficit will be at least £35 billion, with most independent commentators believing that that is literally a conservative estimate.

In the meantime, companies and individuals registered in offshore tax havens like the Bahamas make billions but avoid paying a penny in taxes towards the UK budget. And all of this doom and gloom doesn’t even begin to factor in the potential additional deficits caused by the Tories’ impending shambolic and suicidal stagger over the Brexit cliff.

The reason Islay and other Argyll and Bute communities are struggling to maintain infrastructure and services is not that the SNP government is incompetent, as Councillor Redman claims, but the Westminster Tory (and DUP) government is obsessed with protecting the wealth and power of the privileged few, and is determined to pursue its policy of austerity dogmatically, regardless of how much pain and misery that policy brings to ordinary working families.

Yowann Byghan, Isle of Seil.