Letter: Holding Gordon Brown to account for series of financial blunders

On July 14 1998 after initially sticking to the strict curbs on public spending that he had inherited from the Tories he was now preparing to let rip.

By 1997, public spending stood at £322 billion. Ten years later, after Brown's 1998 Comprehensive Spending Review, it stood at over £600 billion.

The public sector exploded in every direction. A year or two after the start of the spending spree the King's Fund noted that the number of managers in the NHS had risen by 66 per cent – much faster than the numbers of new doctors and nurses.

By 2010 the public sector had become so swollen that it accounted for 52 per cent of our economy, up from 36 per cent in a decade. That left the other 48 per cent to foot a barely imaginable bill – at a time when the private sector was shrinking with each new tax and regulation laid upon it.

Among Brown's worst blunders are:

• Taxing dividends made to pension funds, thereby taking £5 billion a year from people who had worked hard and were looking forward to a decent pension.

• Selling our gold reserves. Considered by economic advisers to be ill-timed due to the slump in the price of gold which was further exacerbated by such a major sell-off driving the price down still further.

• The system of financial regulation dividing powers between the Treasury, the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority, established by Brown in 2000, missed what amounted to the biggest financial crisis of our time.

In 2010 the Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies wrote of the economic crisis "the scale of the underlying problem that the Treasury's detailed forecasts identify will require two full parliaments of mounting austerity to repair" – a statement which is proving to be correct.

J W Simmons, Muxton