Labour is not to blame for austerity

THE chairman of the South West Tory party, Peter Booth claims (HE letters, Nov 7 “Budget was good news for Torbay”) that the economy is recovering well following Labour’s mismanagement before 2010.

Mr Booth says: “It’s important we maintain the discipline and avoid the prospect of Jeremy Corbyn taking us back to square one by raising taxes to the highest level in peacetime history, and sending debt soaring.”

Mr Booth, the discipline of cuts to welfare forcing people to take low waged short-term insecure jobs, if they can get them and having to rely on welfare benefits to get by, is absolutely barbaric. I believe we should all back to the post-war consensus when the state was valued and tax payers money was used to nationalise our country, including nationalising the NHS, and we should all grow up and understand that we cant have our vital services well funded, and pay low income tax.

This doesn’t add up, so yes we should all go back to square one with Jeremy Corbyn, rather than remain in the Victorianised hell-hole the Tories have created in Britain since the 80s.

Peter Booth would have us believe the last Labour Government in 2010 was the cause of it all. This is a lie because the last Labour Government that ran Britain was in the 1970s.

New Labour which Peter Booth refers to 1997- 2010 under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, was not a tax and spend Labour Government as in former and traditional Labour. Tony Blair continued Margaret Thatcher’s Right-wing agenda of shrinking the state that continues today as austerity.

Mrs Thatcher’s first 1980 policy was in breaking the link that kept state pensions for our living war veterans increasing as British prosperity increased.

I would ask Peter Booth how he can justify cutting the value of the state pension to those who made the greatest sacrifice during the Second World War, and worked hard after the war paying their taxes and National Insurance contributions, only to be robbed by Thatcher in 1980 when the then PM moved the goal post on how State pensions would be paid?

Mr Booth talks about our ever-growing economy.

According to the OECD British governments spend much less Gross National Product (overall wealth) on any of our vital services than the governments of Western Europe spend on theirs, which makes the economic deliberations in his letter a red herring. The Tories are a party of privatisation, and is ideologically opposed to a welfare state. This is what cuts in welfare are all about, and Universal Credit is part and parcel of ending the welfare state.