Wishful thinking

IT SEEMS that, with his “It’s time for Labour to become a tax-cutting party, too” (presumably, as well as the Conservatives), Brian Monteith (Perspective, 6 July) craves the replacement of the latter at Westminster by Labour, or is his real target the SNP at Holyrood? If so, he must be the only man left in the Scottish part of the planet who does so.

He had the guile to list an indictment of Labour’s record, which, curiously, demolishes his case. For example, we could expect Labour’s first ports of call to be to reverse every one of the more than 100 stealth taxes they imposed during their disastrous 13 years, including the so-called windfall tax on pensions that Mr Monteith left out.

Also, they presided over an artificial low interest policy, via the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) with its responsibility to control inflation that never happened with warehouses full of foreign-made consumer goods which soon flew off the shelves with a bogus boom in GDP being funded by cheap credit still being paid for.

With the MPC having had no power over house-price inflation, we still suffer from the resulting wrecking of the housing market.

If Mr Monteith is on Labour’s side, too, regarding our inability in Scotland to survive financially with full fiscal autonomy or independence, and were either of these to happen, and Labour became the party in power at Holyrood, does he honestly visualise Labour solving our problems with tax reductions? A bit of wishful thinking!

By the way, Labour’s downfall from 1997 to 2010 was to tread on Tory territory without understanding or believing in any of it.

DOUGLAS R MAYER Thomson Crescent Currie