Letters to the Editor – week ending 07 December 2025

Read what people have been writing to our editor about this week. Find out how to share your own views here.

Economical with the truth

Further to Daniel Green’s piece on the OBR – this is an ideal opportunity to, at least, get someone to lead the OBR who is more open to radical left-wing economics, if not take this whole Tory conception back into the Treasury.

We need to recognise that economics as a profession tends to attract people with an interest in money, and they tend to be capitalists. They start with right-wing views about ‘low tax and trickle down’ and ‘austerity to reduce government debt’ and develop economic arguments to support those views – despite the ‘financial crash’ being caused by private debt and the failure of commercial banks, and the failure of those policies to correct the situation.

The OBR, BoE and the Treasury are stuffed with Conservative appointees, and academia is stuffed with economists who preach the ‘financial establishment’ line because their research funding depends on it. They all have one eye on lucrative future positions in the commercial financial sector.

Austerity and reduced government spending made things worse. Low direct taxation and trickle down didn’t work – how could it? How could rich people spending money ‘trickle down’ to public sector workers, private sector workers on government contracts, state pensioners and other benefit claimants, except through taxation and government spending?

Ultra-low interest rates after the Crash didn’t work and the BoE had to resort the ‘unorthodox’ creation of £900bn to buy Government Debt back from commercial banks only to spoil the concept by starting to pay those banks interest on the cash they kept in the BoE Reserves see chart 1 in the link to the BoE to see how the cash stayed in reserves rather than being used to stimulate the private sector.

All that money created and no inflation – no growth either because it was kept in reserves. 

Then when inflation kicked in following the war in Ukraine, Brexit and lock-down bounce-back; the BoE increased interest base rates. It didn’t work to bring down inflation, it made it worse for mortgagees and businesses – and was a bonanza for commercial banks profits.

The forecasts that Conservative economists in the OBR, BoE and Treasury publish make meteorologists look good. The BoE shouldn’t have responsibility for controlling inflation, they only have one blunt tool to influence it – interest rates, and we have seen that only works in limited situations. It also stymies any growth plans the Chancellor may have.

Rachel Reeves needs to take responsibility, get a grip on the levers of Monetary as well as Fiscal control and take advice from economists who are not enthralled by the ‘financial establishment’.

Regards 

Colin Bryant
Wakefield

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Dear LabourList

I am a Labour Party member, I am elderly and I am disabled. 

Imagine my disbelief when yesterday I received an email from the Labour Party inviting me to join a webinar, what ever that is, about how Labour are helping disabled people. I almost had a fit. Thisis  the party that has cut disability benefits for so many and have now removed a tax exclusion for charitable bodies for Motability. Kowtowing to a right wing newspaper’s (the Daily Mail) campaign.

What is wrong with these people? After so many years of terror from the Tories, Labour, who promised to be on the side of disabled and sick, are copying their cruelty.

Now the boy Streeting is again parroting the right wing press and launching an inquiry as to why so many people are mentally ill and needing help. Ask anyone remotely connected with mental health and they will tell you the answer, no inquiry needed. What’s needed is properly funded services, not tax breaks for the wealthy.

Which brings me to my final point, taxes, all taxes. I will use capitals to make a point. TAXES DO NOT PAY FOR GOVERNMENT SPENDING, NOT NOW NOT EVER!

Taxes are merely the end cycle of money produced by government and already spent. Those amounts collected are simply written off from the government debt. But this is not the same debt as you or I have, this is the debit side of the bank of England. The bank of England has one job – provide by simple key strokes the money asked for legally by the government to cover its budget. Taxes cannot cover spending because they’ve not been collected yet. Taxes are used to reduce inflation and to redistribute wealth either up or down depending on political choices. Bond markets, i.e. gilts are a safe savings deposit with interest for insurance, pension  funds and foreign countries who might trade with us and need £s. The £ is a reserve currency.

The government never borrows it has no need it has its own currency the £ which it produces at will. The £ has value because of the resources that the government has, either human, system or natural resources.

Modern Money Theory, MMT is the system in use in this country and every other country or group of countries with their own currency. Since Thatcher we have been told to look upon the economy of the country as the same as your household. My household cannot make money out of thin air that only exists until it returns through tax.

Government lies to us, newspapers lie to us, it’s now said without a second thought that the government is restrained by the money it needs to borrow from the bond markets or taxes, it’s just nonsense and no one, literally no one can produce evidence to the contrary. 

We need to educate MPs and the public. 

Regards 

Stephen Jones 

Hanging on for the green shoots

As a former MP, constituency chair and member all my adult life, I’ve decided to stay on for the time being, despite the attraction of Your Party – I do agree with Emma that its start has been chaotic and risks steering into far-left irrelevancy.

That said, my reservations about Labour today remain – primarily that we appear to lack any long-term plan, despite our huge Parliamentary majority. Policies appear and disappear with random frequency – the abolition of most jury trials survived for just four days – and I have very little idea what we are positively aiming to achieve. Merely saying we’re not Reform or the Tories is not enough. 

That needs to change if we want to recover our position in the country.

Nick Palmer
Chair, Didcot and Wantage CLP
MP for Broxtowe 1997-2010

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Dear Editor

 It’s been a long hard political winter, ever since July of last year, waiting for the Labour government – OUR Labour government – to deliver on the kind of policies most grassroots have been longing to see, after fourteen years in the wilderness.

For many, we feel that we have waited in vain, and that we have been offered nothing but bitter disappointments.  But maybe, just maybe, there is light at the end of the tunnel, and Labour has got its mojo back.

Joined up thinking at last, with the announcement of the Child Poverty Strategy (strictly, the Child anti-Poverty Strategy, but that doesn’t have the same ring to it).  Just the kind of policies that Party members will love, and, hopefully, a sign that someone is getting a grip on government direction and communications.

It’s early days, but are these finally Starmer’s green shoots of recovery?   

John Burnell
Chingford

[Editors note – yes, this is my Dad!]

Dear England?

Sean Hannigan’s article disturbs me. The logic of his argument is a break up of the UK. Does he want border posts between England, and Wales and Scotland? Think of the disruption. We need to maintain the unity of Great Britain, and rejoin the EU as a priority.

Yours

Nina Smith
Hebden Bridge
(English, British and European)

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