History lesson

Your correspondent Douglas Cowe (Letters, 2 December) makes a number of points about the respective economic competencies of Labour and the Conservatives that just must be challenged.

He mentions the financial crash of 2008, which started with the scandal of sub prime mortgages in the US, and which engulfed Lehman Brothers, Greece, Ireland etc.

It is very difficult to understand why Mr Cowe should believe the Labour Party could possibly be responsible for this worldwide problem. I am not aware that Labour were in charge of the US economy.

Before the crash, under Labour from 1997 to 2007, we had 40 quarters of uninterrupted growth, until the Conservative party’s tax-dodging international banker friends crashed the financial system.

Yes, Labour could have imposed stronger regulations, but at the time the Conservatives were wanting the banks to be totally deregulated.

Mr Cowe also says it has always taken a Conservative government to turn the country round following a period of Labour control.

Yes, that is why the national debt has doubled since the Tories took power seven years ago. And why they have borrowed more than every Labour government in history. And why the promise to balance the books by 2015 has now been postponed to at least 2031. And why after Labour left an economy which had returned to growth, George Osborne promptly increased VAT and national insurance, crashed the economy and put growth into reverse.

Mind you, the Tories are no strangers to recessions, having created them in both 1980 and 1990.

A few years ago, the Tories passed a law saying that there should be a budget surplus every year the economy is growing, as though this was the normal situation. But in the last 60 years, there have only been two periods when the Tories ran budget surpluses, in 1970 and 1988.

Up until the crash, Labour had significantly reduced unemployment, had ten years of uninterrupted growth and the national debt was lower in GDP terms than it had been ten years before.

Let’s not kid ourselves that the Tories are capable of running the country’s economy and Labour are not, history tells us that is clearly not the case.

PHIL TATE Craiglockhart Road, Edinburgh