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Before they indulge in any further parroting of the Tory mantra that Labour overspent (Report, 16 May), perhaps the Labour leadership candidates could ask the House of Commons library for a breakdown of the figures.
They could then explain exactly which items of government expenditure, in 2007 say, they regard as an overspend.
For example, the Conservatives obviously think expenditure on early learning is an overspend, or they would not have cut Sure Start; similarly spending on a decent mental health service is an overspend or provision would not have plummeted from reasonable in 2007 to terrible in 2015.
In 2007 our police community support officers used to cut crime and vandalism by running activities for local young people – an overspend for Tories, apparently. Do the Labour leadership candidates share these views?
Government expenditure for 2007 would necessarily have included a large sum to pay for the Iraq occupation and to step up security after the London bombings.
Robin Cook and 138 other Labour MPs, Charles Kennedy and all the Liberal Democrats, voted that there was no moral case for it; 139 Conservatives out of 154 voted the contrary, so they cannot complain that the costs represented overspending.
My vote will go to a candidate who gives credit to Labour where credit is due, and doesn’t bang on about future generations having to pay our debts.
My generation did not have to pay for the war our parents were forced to fight, because wise governments followed the policies of Beveridge and Keynes to ensure prosperity for the following 30 years.
Austerity policies do the reverse.
Lynne Armstrong
Brixham, Devon
When George Osborne entered No 11 Downing Street, a small but promising recovery of the economy was under way. Osborne got on a soap box and announced that Britain was going down the pan just like Greece, which was a lie.
He sacked public servants in tens of thousands: people whose salaries might have been spent in the economy or to pay taxes, but who instead began to draw jobseeker’s allowance.
He increased VAT by 2.5%, which hurt small producers in the real economy and, of course, the poor. Then he gave himself a 5% income tax cut.
All this destroyed business confidence and delayed the recovery for three years.
Osborne swore that austerity was the only way to protect our AAA credit rating, but that went and the sky didn’t fall in. Have we all forgotten the “omnishambles” budget?
He lambasted Labour for excessive borrowing and spending, but in his first three years Osborne borrowed more money and spent more than the Labour government did in 13 years.
More money is spent on in-work social security than on jobseekers because too many jobs do not pay a living wage; so Osborne is subsidising bad employers with our money.
Additional social security is spent on housing benefit to tenants who cannot afford their rents; so Osborne is subsidising rapacious landlords too.
He promised to clear the deficit by 2015, but is not even halfway there. Why did the Labour frontbench allow this to go unnoticed for five years?
John Henley’s visits to Stroud and to Carlisle (16 May) indicated that Osborne won on the economy. They are now planning five more years of the same. Will they be allowed to get away with it again?
Jim Grove
Cowbridge, Vale of Glamorgan
After losing the election there’s a letter from several MPs (16 May) saying we need a new leader to “take on big business” and offer a “university course with a job at the end of it”. These MPs think big business is bad.
So people who have worked hard to get a large company going employing lots of people is bad?
There are some big businesses that of course try and find ways to avoid paying corporation tax, but I would guess they are few rather than many.
Labour should be trying to educate big business in being socially responsible rather than taking them on.
People still have to work at getting a job just like anyone else, whether they leave school at 16 or 18 or after university.
Andrew Devon
Hove, East Sussex
Now a Labour leadership candidate, Liz Kendall, joins the current craze for budget surpluses, as if these are a measure of virtue. When is someone going to challenge this nonsense?
Budget surpluses and deficits are policy instruments, not policy objectives.
If the economy is weak or slowing in 2018-19, the last thing it will need is a chancellor taking demand out of the economy via a budget surplus, as George Osborne should have learned from his near-death experience in 2012.
Roy Boffy
Walsall, West Midlands
Labour didn’t lose because it failed to support a New Labour business agenda. It lost because it never nailed the Tory lie that Labour left behind a dreadful economic mess – as though the banks and the international recession had nothing to do with it.
And it never challenged the Tory canard that Labour was profligate, when in fact the Thatcher-Major governments in 10 out of their 18 years ratcheted up deficits bigger than Labour’s in any of its 1997-2008 pre-crash years.
That left millions of undecided voters at the end who were sympathetic to Ed Miliband’s positive reform programme, but who, faced with the relentless barrage of negative Tory propaganda about Labour’s economic record, felt they couldn’t risk a vote for Labour.
Miliband was right that the banks, the corporate elite and the media had too much power and had abused it by inflating their own incomes and wealth at the expense of everyone else and by seeking to suppress all those forces, notably the unions, that stood up for the vulnerable and dispossessed.
He was right that a deregulated predatory capitalism needed reform.
By contrast the New Labour approach was that big cuts needed to be made to pay off the deficit, but slightly more gently, by cutting less far and less fast.
However, that was the worst of all worlds. It implied that Labour accepted the Tory framing of the election that Labour caused the financial crash, that the deficit was the central issue and that deep cuts in pay, benefits and public services were the right way to deal it.
All these claims are fundamentally wrong. The right response, which Labour sadly never argued for, was to use public investment to expand the economy, not shrink it.
And by increasing jobs and wages, raise tax receipts so the deficit could be paid off faster. It is tragic that this far better alternative was never argued for.
Michael Meacher MP
Labour, Oldham West and Royton
You talk in your editorial (18 May) about the multiple questions facing Labour.
But the basic socio-economic question is how to deal with an economic system in which the banks create money and direct less than 10% of it to proper businesses making things and providing services.
The rest goes to real estate – mainly residential – and the finance industry. Industrial capitalism it ain’t.
Two possible responses are: for the state to take over creating money (sovereign money); and/or to moderate newly created money going into real estate.
The latter is best done by a land value tax, making real estate less of a risk-free investment.
Only one Labour leadership candidate (Andy Burnham) has ever shown any interest in either of these ideas (the second one).
DBC Reed
Northampton
Before they indulge in any further parroting of the Tory mantra that Labour overspent (Report, 16 May), perhaps the Labour leadership candidates could ask the House of Commons library for a breakdown of the figures.
They could then explain exactly which items of government expenditure, in 2007 say, they regard as an overspend.
For example, the Conservatives obviously think expenditure on early learning is an overspend, or they would not have cut Sure Start; similarly spending on a decent mental health service is an overspend or provision would not have plummeted from reasonable in 2007 to terrible in 2015.
In 2007 our police community support officers used to cut crime and vandalism by running activities for local young people – an overspend for Tories, apparently. Do the Labour leadership candidates share these views?
Government expenditure for 2007 would necessarily have included a large sum to pay for the Iraq occupation and to step up security after the London bombings.
Robin Cook and 138 other Labour MPs, Charles Kennedy and all the Liberal Democrats, voted that there was no moral case for it; 139 Conservatives out of 154 voted the contrary, so they cannot complain that the costs represented overspending.
My vote will go to a candidate who gives credit to Labour where credit is due, and doesn’t bang on about future generations having to pay our debts.
My generation did not have to pay for the war our parents were forced to fight, because wise governments followed the policies of Beveridge and Keynes to ensure prosperity for the following 30 years.
Austerity policies do the reverse.
Lynne Armstrong
Brixham, Devon
When George Osborne entered No 11 Downing Street, a small but promising recovery of the economy was under way. Osborne got on a soap box and announced that Britain was going down the pan just like Greece, which was a lie.
He sacked public servants in tens of thousands: people whose salaries might have been spent in the economy or to pay taxes, but who instead began to draw jobseeker’s allowance.
He increased VAT by 2.5%, which hurt small producers in the real economy and, of course, the poor. Then he gave himself a 5% income tax cut.
All this destroyed business confidence and delayed the recovery for three years.
Osborne swore that austerity was the only way to protect our AAA credit rating, but that went and the sky didn’t fall in. Have we all forgotten the “omnishambles” budget?
He lambasted Labour for excessive borrowing and spending, but in his first three years Osborne borrowed more money and spent more than the Labour government did in 13 years.
More money is spent on in-work social security than on jobseekers because too many jobs do not pay a living wage; so Osborne is subsidising bad employers with our money.
Additional social security is spent on housing benefit to tenants who cannot afford their rents; so Osborne is subsidising rapacious landlords too.
He promised to clear the deficit by 2015, but is not even halfway there. Why did the Labour frontbench allow this to go unnoticed for five years?
John Henley’s visits to Stroud and to Carlisle (16 May) indicated that Osborne won on the economy. They are now planning five more years of the same. Will they be allowed to get away with it again?
Jim Grove
Cowbridge, Vale of Glamorgan
After losing the election there’s a letter from several MPs (16 May) saying we need a new leader to “take on big business” and offer a “university course with a job at the end of it”. These MPs think big business is bad.
So people who have worked hard to get a large company going employing lots of people is bad?
There are some big businesses that of course try and find ways to avoid paying corporation tax, but I would guess they are few rather than many.
Labour should be trying to educate big business in being socially responsible rather than taking them on.
People still have to work at getting a job just like anyone else, whether they leave school at 16 or 18 or after university.
Andrew Devon
Hove, East Sussex
Now a Labour leadership candidate, Liz Kendall, joins the current craze for budget surpluses, as if these are a measure of virtue. When is someone going to challenge this nonsense?
Budget surpluses and deficits are policy instruments, not policy objectives.
If the economy is weak or slowing in 2018-19, the last thing it will need is a chancellor taking demand out of the economy via a budget surplus, as George Osborne should have learned from his near-death experience in 2012.
Roy Boffy
Walsall, West Midlands
Labour didn’t lose because it failed to support a New Labour business agenda. It lost because it never nailed the Tory lie that Labour left behind a dreadful economic mess – as though the banks and the international recession had nothing to do with it.
And it never challenged the Tory canard that Labour was profligate, when in fact the Thatcher-Major governments in 10 out of their 18 years ratcheted up deficits bigger than Labour’s in any of its 1997-2008 pre-crash years.
That left millions of undecided voters at the end who were sympathetic to Ed Miliband’s positive reform programme, but who, faced with the relentless barrage of negative Tory propaganda about Labour’s economic record, felt they couldn’t risk a vote for Labour.
Miliband was right that the banks, the corporate elite and the media had too much power and had abused it by inflating their own incomes and wealth at the expense of everyone else and by seeking to suppress all those forces, notably the unions, that stood up for the vulnerable and dispossessed.
He was right that a deregulated predatory capitalism needed reform.
By contrast the New Labour approach was that big cuts needed to be made to pay off the deficit, but slightly more gently, by cutting less far and less fast.
However, that was the worst of all worlds. It implied that Labour accepted the Tory framing of the election that Labour caused the financial crash, that the deficit was the central issue and that deep cuts in pay, benefits and public services were the right way to deal it.
All these claims are fundamentally wrong. The right response, which Labour sadly never argued for, was to use public investment to expand the economy, not shrink it.
And by increasing jobs and wages, raise tax receipts so the deficit could be paid off faster. It is tragic that this far better alternative was never argued for.
Michael Meacher MP
Labour, Oldham West and Royton
You talk in your editorial (18 May) about the multiple questions facing Labour.
But the basic socio-economic question is how to deal with an economic system in which the banks create money and direct less than 10% of it to proper businesses making things and providing services.
The rest goes to real estate – mainly residential – and the finance industry. Industrial capitalism it ain’t.
Two possible responses are: for the state to take over creating money (sovereign money); and/or to moderate newly created money going into real estate.
The latter is best done by a land value tax, making real estate less of a risk-free investment.
Only one Labour leadership candidate (Andy Burnham) has ever shown any interest in either of these ideas (the second one).
DBC Reed
Northampton
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