Letter: Deficit is not main issue, we must reduce the national debt

The deficit is merely the country's current account, the figure we should be looking at is the national debt (the overall debt of the country minus its assets).

The current Tory Chancellor has increased this figure over the past five years by more than all Labour governments in history combined! George Osborne inherited a debt of under £1 trillion and it now stands at over £1.5 trillion. As a proportion of GDP this abject performance has only been topped three times in history, coinciding with the two world wars and the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

As for the anecdotal "a Tory government always has to clean up the mess after a Labour government" only two Labour chancellors left an increase in debt, in 1931 after the Wall Street crash and in 2010 following the global stock market crash.

Since then Osborne and Danny Alexander have added way more debt in five years than Labour did in the previous13.

Another untruth is "we have to pursue a policy of austerity to balance the books". A recent survey by the Centre for Macroeconomics (affiliated to the Bank of England, Oxbridge Universities, London School of Economics amongst others) asked this question and over 80 per cent of respondents disagreed stating that austerity brought the economy to a standstill from 2010 to 2012 and it only started a very slow recovery after the Coalition covertly relaxed such measures in 2012.

This indicates that current Tory policies are merely political dogma designed to reduce the public sector, which they loathe, and transfer wealth proportionately from the poorest to the richest.

Indeed, a recent Oxfam survey shows that, worldwide, the wealthiest one per cent of people own 48 per cent of all wealth and this figure will pass 50 per cent next year. George Osborne is certainly doing his bit for Britain in this regard.

Andrew Nock, Telford