SIR – In your editorial on August 1 you referred to ‘the launch of austerity to balance the books and pay off the national debt’. The blogger Thomas Clark seems to me to be an informed observer of our national life. He wrote a few days ago that ‘the Tory austerity agenda was never really about tackling the government debt or stimulating economic growth... It’s an incredible feat of propaganda that the Tories managed to delude millions of people into believing that austerity was about fixing the debt, rather than transferring wealth from poor and ordinary people to their super-rich backers, but it worked.’ As he, and the Green Party, have pointed out many times, the government could have followed the post-war example by investing not cutting.

Neil Laurenson

Worcester Green Party