MADAM - Being a beneficiary of the excellent charity Talking Newspaper, I regularly listen to Mark Garnier’s MP’s Review.

I am always amused by and in admiration of his political and personal dexterity in his reviews. However, his column in the Shuttle on September 20, 2018, on the state of the economy was blatantly deceptive as he failed to mention the worldwide financial crisis and this country’s bail out of the banks on October 8, 2008, just two years before our MP entered Parliament.

It is the introductory paragraph of this review that I found offensive:

“Just after I was elected in 2010, the Government had to bring in measures to deal with the dire state of public finances. Chronic overspending for years had led to a big annual deficit between what the Government was committed to spend and what it received in taxation. Without tackling it head on, we were heading into financial oblivion and our predecessors – the architects of the problem – hadn’t even begun to deal with it."

Like many of your readers I did not remember any detail of this financial crisis but then, in just under two weeks, as if on cue, the BBC had two 10th anniversary programmes on this subject.

One was on Radio 4 on October 6, 2018, ‘Archive on 4’ entitled ‘The Bail Out’ when the then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown and his colleagues, outlined his efforts to co-ordinate a world-wide solution to avoid any further bank crashes occurring and then outlined his actions on Wednesday October 8, 2008.

Surely this avoided a real ‘financial oblivion’ which the Government then had to start paying for.

The second was a programme on BBC2 entitled ‘The Bank That Almost Broke Britain’ with a review led by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling. This programme showed that after the assent of the Financial Services Act in 1986, which led to the financial ‘Big Bang’, RBS, a small ancient Edinburgh bank, modernised and started buying up other banks and became one of the foremost worldwide banks with assets of £2.2 trillion.

Then by October 7, 2008, it found that its shares had fallen by 90%.

This was by far the major recipient of the £500 billion made available by the Government to bail out the British banks. It was finally concluded that this cost the British taxpayer upwards of £1 trillion.

Surely Mark Garnier must have heard about this when he joined the Treasury later on?

Retrospectively, I think that the present Government rightly concentrated on getting the best value for the tax payer from public services. But also their so called general austerity budgets should have included reasonable tax rises that would have lessened the noticeable decline in those services including Council services.

Yours faithfully

Dr George R Mattocks

BSc., PhD., C.Eng., F Instit E, FSGT

Address supplied