Spending cuts

Let us inject a different angle to the current problem. I moved into my present home at the start of the Blair regime, annual council tax then about £650. I’m now paying £1,500-plus. Cuts, cuts, Coun Henig, perhaps you might inform the public as to how on earth we’re in a deficit with such an increase in money given to local councils?

Despite local people voting to keep them, the reason given by Coun Henig and his cohorts for getting rid of the district councils was, you guessed it, to save us millions of pounds and (don’t laugh) reduce our council tax level.

The Labour government oversaw the loss of all bar one factory in Spennymoor, countless others across South West Durham closed or have reduced manning and whole swathes of the private sector operate on shorter hours and pay freezes – where were the union men and socialists then?

Coun Henig might be photographed cutting a cake for the press, but he’s another pie-in-the-sky socialist who simply doesn’t value taxpayers’ money.

Jim Tague, Bishop Auckland.

LIKE most people I have been watching the unfolding spending cuts debates. I find it hard to understand why intelligence is not being applied, not just to government plans, but also trade unions.

No fighters for our two new aircraft carriers: cancel the American order (which, in my view, should never have gone outside our country) and build them in the UK. That alone is a lot of jobs, and there will be many other such examples.

If we can have a minimum wage, we can have a maximum wage (to include value of all share options, company cars, bonus payments, etc).

For public services, if they want the same number of jobs, very sorry, but they are going to have agree to adopt what private companies did years ago. I did.

Final salary pension schemes, etc, are just unaffordable.

One could go on for quite some time I suspect, but I won’t bore everybody.

James W Edwards, Middleton One Row, near Darlington.

SHADOW Chancellor Alan Johnson was absolutely correct when, in response to Chancellor George Osborne’s spending review cuts, he stated that these were driven by ideology, not economics.

The true right-wing Tories have always despised the welfare state, which was the brainchild of a Liberal politician and implemented by Clement Attlee’s Labour government after the Second World War.

The Conservatives have seen our nation’s economic problems as an ideal opportunity to begin dismantling the welfare state, brick by brick, and this is just the beginning.

Mr Osborne insults the public intellect by claiming he will crack down on tax avoidance when he himself will benefit from a trust fund, set up by his father, to avoid paying death duties.

Keith Dewison, Billingham.

IF the cuts the Government is imposing are across the board and fair – as it says – then maybe if ministers want us to believe them they could start with the House of Commons restaurants.

MPs have more good restaurants than most northern towns, so if they got rid of the subsidies they receive in them it would show good faith.

I would like the cost of the average meal they get in place of my pension.

Harry Manuel, Hexham, Northumberland