Pendle Labour Party Blog

I write in response to Coun. George Askew’s claims that Labour did Nothing (Leader Times 28th October). The first question is: what planet does he live on, never mind what ward he lives in? He says the UK was spending £170 billion more than it was receiving in tax, that it was a cheap shot to question the tax avoidance of non-doms who bankroll the Conservatives, and that it has been left up to George Osborne to sort out the financial mess left by Labour.

However, at best he appears to be misinformed and at worst blatantly ignorant of the facts. Labour spent less as a proportion of GDP than either of the governments of Thatcher or Major. When Labour came to power in 1997 national debt stood at 42% of GDP. By 2002 it was below 30%. Granted, it slowly increased to 36% between 2002 and 2008 (still lower than Thatcher or Major) as a result of the urgent need to rebuild our public services which had suffered from two decades of underinvestment. The increase, coupled with the windfall tax on utilities in 1997 to compensate for the cheap Tory sell off of public assets, allowed Labour to build new schools, reduce class sizes, build new hospitals, reduce waiting lists, reduce poverty levels amongst vulnerable groups such as children and pensioners and provide public servants with a living wage, along with many others as a result of the National Minimum Wage.

It wasn’t until the global banking sector crisis that the debt to GDP ratio hit 52% by the time Labour left office in 2010 - but this was still lower than those of Japan, the US, France and Germany.

So what response? George Osborne came to the dispatch box in 2010 and declared “Britain was on the verge of bankruptcy”. Despite his claims of economic woe he chose to cut corporation tax while imposing unprecedented cuts on welfare and other public spending, resulting in a return to Thatcherite levels of unemployment at 2.57 million and rising inflation which currently stands at 5.6%.

So in light of these inconvenient truths perhaps Mr Askew would like to revise his simplistic view, because if these are the results of the Tories doing something then I prefer Labour’s “nothing”.

Yours faithfully
Mark Porter