Everything costs

Labour partisans are still smarting from being excluded from power by a coalition government working in the national interest. Had Labour remained in government, it fully intended to raise VAT to 20 per cent.

Sure Start may have helped some, but audits indicate that it did not always help the families for whom it was intended.

The allegation that Liberal Democrats have "betrayed" progressive politics is nonsense. Labour's suggestion of betrayal is based on its premise that the coalition is a government "that nobody chose", so implying that coalition – except with Labour, on Labour's terms – is illegitimate.

It denies that the Labour government had proposed cuts of 20 per cent in many public services and to halve capital investment, portraying all spending reductions as sell-outs to Conservatives who want to "shrink the state".

It slides over Labour's own record in government, which has left the UK with a society more unequal than at any time since the 1930s and more heavily dependent upon the financial services industry, which was caught up in the consequences of the collapse of the financial boom.

The Labour government was deeply authoritarian, doubling the prison population and cutting back probation services, as crime fell; it followed populist initiatives on youth crime and asylum-seekers; it let "non-doms" and hedge funders escape progressive taxation; it took us into an "illegal" war with Iraq, costing not only lives but also billions of pounds that instead might have gone into public investment; and it abandoned the programme of political reform agreed when Labour was in opposition in 1996.

While it is true that money was poured into many public services, Labour, however, failed to raise taxes to pay for them, or for long-term public investment.

We know what it is to be liberal and to put Liberal Democrat principles into practice, whereas Labour, like its former leader, Tony Blair, seems to have forgotten what it's like to have principles!

Councillor Nick Wiltshire

secretary, Bognor Regis & Littlehampton Liberal Democrats

Kendal Close

Littlehampton

Editor's note: this correspondence is now closed.

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