JOHN Lister is obviously right to say economic growth is necessary to “fund the deficit”. The rest of his letter, apparently replying to Messrs Webb is woefully wrong.

Serious economists have been attempting to explain how an obsession with over rapid paying off deficits can be counter productive. When the private sector is refusing to invest wealth the worst thing governments can do is to also refuse to invest. You end up with bigger deficits as the economy fails to grow.

Mr Lister thinks he has clinched his argument by saying Labour sponsored the economic downturn. The last Labour Government certainly deserves criticism. It continued and accelerated a Thatcherite agenda of privatisation and war. But average growth between 1997 and 2010 was 2.1 per cent GDP. That includes the international economic crash caused by financiers when the latest of a set of speculative bubbles burst.

It is simply stupid to suggest that crash was caused by the Labour Government even if you can criticise their worship of that neo liberal model which was also supported, then and now, by the Tories. In the 12 months to the 2010 election the economy grew by 2 per cent. Then the incoming Tory Government’s austerity brought the economy to a shuddering halt. In 2012 the worst of the austerity measures was quietly relaxed and the economy saw the weakest recovery ever, based on more debt and low wages. Now we are facing an even bigger shift of wealth to the richest from the rest of us.

PETER SMITH Woodside Avenue Swindon