A reply to the newspaper

For the first time ever someone has replied to one of my letters to the local paper. I wrote about this letter on the 15th July and then on the 28th and now here is my reply sent to the local paper today.

I am pleased to receive a reply to one of my letters, since I have written many over the years but nobody has ever replied, so thanks must go to David Whitaker. However, I'm not sure he addressed the points that I made. It is worth repeating that the Labour administration which he praises left a deficit of four trillion pounds - £65,000 for each and every person.

He writes “The Con/Dem coalition should be bringing down borrowing in a manner that does not damage our front line services”. So how do we reduce a debt of £65,000 per person without it hurting? We can't all win the lottery, even if Labour thought we could. I am surprised that someone who apparently supports all the policies that got us into this mess can tell us how to get out of it. However I do agree it’s important that we target cuts so the worst-off don’t become the hardest-hit. In fact, that is exactly what I said, and what the Liberal Democrats are fighting hard to achieve.

I prefer the term “the Coalition”, without the adjective Con/Dem but this is one step up from calling us Liberals. I voted for a change of name as a member of the Liberal Party in 1988 but many of our greatest Labour minds cannot give us our correct title. I spoke with Geraldine Smith on election day and she called me a Liberal. I don’t think it was an insult, however if David is going to use “Con/Dem” repeatedly as an insult then I'll mention a typo in one of my daily political blogs that I wrote before the election. I wrote about the Labout Party. It was an accidental insult as r is next to t but it did seem appropriate at the time.

Yours faithfully,

Michael Gradwell