In reply to RJ Barnes (“Labour didn’t deserve to lose”, June 10) can I suggest he swaps his rose-tinted glasses for reading glasses?

Prosperity built on debt and an artificially induced housing boom is as real as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Government net debt is soaring — and could hit £1.4trillion over the next five years (exceeding 100 per cent of GDP). Gordon ignored the home grown housing bubble, even calling it a “bubble” as early as 2005, but did nothing to stop it.

Labour has destroyed private-sector final salary pensions, but over the last decade nearly three-fifths of the growth in jobs was in the public sector adding further to the unfunded pension liabilities now approaching £1,000 billion. Will you pay for this?

Taxpayers paid for the investment in schools, hospitals and police.

A family man with two children who earns £40,000 a year is now paying as much as 50p in the pound to the Government in taxes, a 50 per cent increase on the 35p in the pound of 1997. The average family now pays an extra £5,000 in taxes.

On economic performance, £20billion a year of our money is wasted because productivity across public services has dropped by between 15 per cent and 20 per cent . Labour declared that Britain would march “forward to increased prosperity, not back to boom and bust”. The reality is that the UK plunged into the deepest recession and was also the last to emerge from it despite claims of being ‘the best placed’.

Labour pledged to eliminate youth unemployment — it is currently running at more than 920,000 among 16 to 24 year olds and eight million people of working age are idle in Britain. Clearly R J Barnes, Labour isn’t working.

Pravin Seedher, Hawthorn Drive, Harrow