Your regular correspondent Mr White (Basingstoke Gazette, Thursday, September 19) really is scraping the barrel to rescue his beloved Tories. At least two of the most recent Tory PM's would earn titles far worse than "dud". Liar and imbecile (Johnson and Truss)?

He refers to the 70s and the so called halcyon days of his beloved Thatcher. She did some good things but destroyed society. 

Ironic that the Tories still try to portray Labour as reckless with taxpayers' money. What the Tories did over the last 10 years was try to blind us all with how much they were spending on public services while actually making no attempt to check how the money was being spent. They systematically and deliberately ran down all public services by not making sure that it got to the front line. In fact billions ended up in the pockets of Tory backers such as the big accountancy firms who were happy to pick up lucrative consultancies in the public sector. Remember VIP lanes during Covid?

Labour are being brutally honest in their assessment of what we can afford as the Tories have destroyed our economy. So let's stop bleating about things like withdrawal of the winter fuel payments.

Ninety per cent of those who got that hand out did not need it but surprise surprise they will mostly have been dyed in the wool Tories. Labour I am confident will find out a way to help those caught just above the Pension Credit cut off but not by dishing out billions of pounds unnecessarily.

So which party is it that wastes public money and wrecks the economy Mr White?

Russell Burton

Basingstoke 

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