MANY of the points John McGarry and John Glen made in their reply to me in last week's Postbag (“UK GDP has continued to steadily rise”, Jan 15th), can only be countered by a detailed look at the evidence, so rather than bore Postbag readers I am collecting that evidence and putting it online (you can Google “UK GDP has continued to steadily rise” if you are interested).

However, I note that neither of them made any attempt to rebut my key assertions and their comments were inconsistent or disingenuous.

For example why does John MacGarry ridicule my suggestion that George Osborne could have maintained the 2010 recovery with a programme of borrowing (at 0 per cent) to invest in capital projects and yet does not comment on Tory plans to borrow vast sums of money for such projects as a high speed rail network, a tunnel under Stonehenge, and an eye wateringly expensive nuclear power station which will entail UK tax payers subsidising the French and Chinese governments for the foreseeable future? Where's the consistency?

Coincidentally this week George Osborne has announced the sale of £10 billion of pensioners 65+ Bonds, this is equivalent to the government borrowing £10 billion pounds at four per cent interest.

The people buying these bonds will be better off pensioners who do not need any further help from the chancellor. In fact it represents a transfer of wealth from ordinary people and particularly young people to wealthy pensioners. That's £10 billion pounds that could have been invested in real jobs in the real economy. You couldn't make it up.

John Glen perseveres with trying to blame the financial crisis on the Labour party by mentioning 'Labour's structural deficit'. This is an elusive quantity on which no two experts agree but nevertheless John is right to say that it needs to be addressed. But he is wrong to imply that this was the cause of the financial crisis or the problems the government has had in reducing the deficit. Let's be clear - the financial crisis was caused by greedy and incompetent bankers. Don't take my word for it, ask the Governor of the Bank of England.

The delay in reducing the deficit, has been due to George Osborne's austerity programme. He presumably realised this himself because in 2013 he belatedly indulged in a fiscal stimulus (which he previously said we could not afford). This stimulus included a debt fuelled house price bubble which has resulted in better off but still hard pressed youngsters buying unaffordable houses with unaffordable mortgages and as house prices rose and private rents increased we had yet another net transfer of wealth from ordinary people to the better off.

Why didn't Osborne choose to stimulate the economy by building houses rather than just putting house prices up? Perhaps because that would have involved a transfer of wealth to ordinary people and smaller businesses in the form of better paid jobs, lower rents and cheaper houses.

The debt fuelled recovery and the free gift of low fuel prices may lull some of us into a false sense of security but for the future we are promised even more unnecessarily draconian and ideologically driven cuts. This will inevitably hit those on lower incomes the hardest, will stall the recovery and will increase the very real and serious risk of deflation. No thanks.

Colin Lawson

Salisbury