SIR – I note much to and fro resulting from Ian Parsons’s letter (T&A, January 17).

Peter Ashton’s contribution to the debate (T&A, January 21) was interesting. As with most arguments as to what triggered the 2008 crash, nuggets of truth are buried under mounds of obfuscation.

Former school economics teacher John Cole sought to dispel ‘myths and legends’ but created some more.

The fact is that in Labour’s ‘boom’ years, 2000-2006, spending on public services increased at an annual average rate of 6.4 per cent and total spending growth, including social security, averaged 4.8 per cent per annum in real terms after inflation.

Much is made of current cuts in local government spending, but for context your readers ought to know that in the first year of Blair’s government, 1997-1998, it totalled £72.5 billion or 8.7 per cent of GDP. By 2006-2007 it had ballooned in cash terms to £140.8 billion, or 10.6 per cent of GDP.

It was an unsustainable splurge built on artificially-bloated tax revenues which Labour conveniently, but ruinously, regarded as a permanent structural addition to the tax base, rather than as a purely cyclical phenomenon from which the wheels duly fell off in a big way!

Mike Pollard, Moorfield Drive, Baildon