sir – Since the coalition government came to power they have consistently claimed that the country was in a worse state than they were led to believe.

George Osborne claimed in his Budget speech that they had not inherited from the previous government a creditable plan to reduce the deficit. This is completely untrue. The Tory-created Office for Budget Responsibility analysed Alistair Darling’s last Budget and concluded that the measures in it would have halved the deficit in four years, which is the time frame recommended by the G20. The cost of government borrowing has fallen over the past year.

Mr Osborne claimed in his Budget that we were in danger of becoming embroiled with the same problems as the eurozone. This is also untrue. The UK’s economic position compared with the eurozone is that the UK has the lowest debt to GDP ratio of any major EU economy and the average maturity of the debt at 14 years is double that of any European economy.

The Chancellor uses the structural deficit to justify his ideological plans. The structural deficit is not the actual deficit, it is a construct relying on assumptions that have been consistently changed to justify the deficit is worse, when in truth the overall economic position was better than Alistair Darling predicted.

Richard Boorn
Claines