Grim legacy

I fear it is Dr Mark Campbell-Roddis (Letters, 29 May) who is off the beam on the financial morass. The fundamental truth is that responsibility lies firmly with the Labour government's 13 wasted years. It is disingenuous for him to attempt to attach blame to the new Chancellor – had Labour won the election, they, too, would have been obliged to cut public spending.

What is exercising the coalition government primarily is the structural deficit – in other words, the fiscal mess Labour created by presiding over unrealistically low interest rates which generated cheap money and a credit-driven, false, unsustainable GDP growth that fed the exchequer with massive extra tax proceeds (the genius of Gordon Brown recognised the folly of interfering with that scenario). It was when the banks consequently ran out of money that they ran into trouble.

The recovery of the money "invested" in the banks to bail them out will be achieved, according to Alistair Darling when he was chancellor, when the government sells, at a profit, the bank shares acquired when the banks were, effectively, nationalised.

It is no wonder Labour politicians are smiling – by losing the election they are managing to avoid the opprobrium the coalition will encounter when Labour's chickens come home to roost. Does Dr Campbell-Roddis consider is was sheer insolence for Labour, in its dying days, to claim it had found 30 billion of "efficiency" savings? Would a better definition of that not be "inefficiency", or, better still, "waste"?

Of course, there will be discontent when the cuts bite. The problem is that Labour used the public sector as a solution for the unemployment problem. In Scotland alone, since devolution, it is boasted that spending has doubled (at a time when inflation was allegedly low), with numbers rising from about 500,000 to 600,000. The first port of call for Independent Budget Review Panel, which is due to report to Holyrood by the end of July, must be to examine the viability of these posts.

Regarding social unrest, I think Dr Campbell-Roddis is allowing his blinkered vision to stand in the way of reality: it was the winter of discontent, under the previous Labour regime in the 1970s, that reduced this country to its knees.

DOUGLAS R MAYER

Thomson Crescent

Currie, Midlothian