Labour’s legacy of “despair”

At about the time Mr Warren’s carefully-prepared tirade about the shameful sell-out of our woodland heritage was being printed, the Minister was reporting to Parliament on the abandonment of the consultation.

She had listened to the protests, acknowledged the cock-up, apologised and moved on. No worries then about blind Tory dogma or potential tragedy for all of us and future generations.

What future generations will, unfortunately, have to cope with is the burden of the empty Treasury left by the most incompetent, venal and unattractive government in memory.

In due course after taking office, Labour achieved the following: set up the Financial Services Authority which lamentably failed to regulate the banks; sold much of our gold reserves at rock bottom prices; trashed the private pensions industry; encouraged public sector employment and remuneration to steam ahead; encouraged debt-fuelled consumption and imported goods; seemed to delight in ever-rising house prices; landed our children with a multi-billion-pound bill as a result of Private Finance Initiative schemes; worked themselves into an obsession with targets in our hospitals and schools - frequently at the expense of standards; did nothing to stop the relentless encroachment of Europe; bottled out of welfare reform; took us into the Iraq war on a dodgy prospectus; left us with youth unemployment of one million; and so on and so on.

Most dispiriting of all, Labour left us with reduced social mobility and increasing numbers of our people trapped in poverty and despair. Answers please, Mr Warren.

Cllr David Russell

Rye Hill, Rye