UK GDP has continued to steadily rise

He has chosen his reference date for recovery as 2007 because, under the previous Labour government, that was the peak of UK GDP, and was followed by two years of deep recession. In contrast, the other G7 countries continued to grow for a further year, and their peak was typically in 2008.

Under the Conservative-led government, which came into power in 2010, UK GDP has grown steadily every year, and is now back to its previous peak.

The only G7 countries to have recovered back to their peak (whether 2007 or 2008), apart from the UK, are the USA and Canada. However, far more important than this dry debate about statistics is Mr Lawson's diagnosis of the problem and his proposed cure. He advocates 'a programme of investment in our country's future ... (which) would have pumped money into ... jobs ... (and) stimulated the economy'. For 'pump money' read 'higher levels of public sector spending, funded by higher taxes and increased borrowing'.

Surely this approach has been totally discredited – even Ed Balls no longer parrots 'too far, too fast', and warns of cutting public expenditure. If more evidence were necessary, we need look no further than France, which has followed exactly this path, and was initially applauded for doing so by Ed Milliband. France is now an economic basket case, still in recession, and with catastrophic levels of unemployment. Also the very idea that the USA and Canada engineered their recovery by a policy of increased public sector spending is laughable.

What truly would be a waste would be for an unrepentant Left-wing party, which appears to have learnt nothing from the past, to be let loose to wreck our economy again.

John McGarry

West Harnham

YOUR correspondent Colin Lawson (Letters, 8th January) took issue with the statistics I cited in my last “View from the Commons” piece.

Mr Lawson is not so much disagreeing with me as with the International Monetary Fund and the Office for National Statistics, who confirmed that the UK had the fastest growing economy in the G7 over 2014 as a whole.

What 2015 will bring is not known, given external shocks – and it will depend upon who is elected in May, and whether they can command the confidence of UK businesses and international markets. The UK outstripped US real GDP growth by one per cent in 2014, but the US is forecast to be ahead by less than half a percentage point in 2015.

Mr Lawson forgets that the government can’t be held responsible for Labour’s decisions after 2007, but rather only for the choices that it has taken since the election. Looking at employment, over three quarters of the number of people in work since the election are full-time jobs, and the proportion is only growing: with full-time jobs accounting for 95 per cent of the rise in employment over the past year.

Mr Lawson seems to be guilty of failing to put his own statistics in context: that it will often be self-employed people and lower skilled workers who are most likely to lose their jobs in a recession. At any rate, two thirds of the rise in employment since 2010 has been in higher skilled occupations.

Neither the government nor I deny that there is more work to be done. I will be urging the government to press ahead with long-term changes that will give sustained growth and ensure that this is not a temporary recovery. The government had to address Labour’s structural deficit (not just the cyclical deficit to which Mr Lawson alludes), and is making serious progress in doing so.

I do not pretend that every statistic will be a positive one. But the government has been taking steps to build more affordable homes, invested in new infrastructure, ringfenced NHS spending, and sought to improve the quality of education to equip our future workforce. These are long-term policies: and it will be for voters in 2015 to decide whether they want to stay the course or risk the recovery by going back to unsustainable government spending.

John Glen MP

Member of Parliament for Salisbury