I would like to take issue with Thomas Curr, whose letter in last week’s Journal asserted that ‘Only by voting Conservative can readers send the message that tax and spend politics has gone too far.’

After 13 years of Conservative government, taxation is at its highest level since the 1950s and the increasing dependence of many on foodbanks, even when working full time, is irrefutable evidence that the current government has no interest in helping ordinary working people. 

Instead of funding the NHS properly, this government has funnelled millions into private medicine while leaving front-line services struggling to cope. 

Instead of helping to decrease our dependence on damaging and expensive fossil fuels by supporting renewable energy, this government has chosen to invest our ‘hard earned money’ into a new oil field at a time when the threat to our climate is terrifying.

Instead of funding state education, schools are struggling to provide the basics, teachers are exhausted and many of our ‘precious children’ appallingly betrayed. 

If these are the ‘good reasons’ people have for sending their children to private schools, it is as a result of 13 years of Conservative policy that these reasons exist. Unless, of course, Mr Curr considers that only the children of the wealthy are ‘precious’?

It is clear to many of us that the Conservative government that has been in power since 2010 has done nothing in all this time to end ‘tax and spend politics’, so I can assure Mr Curr that I won’t be voting Conservative.

Clare Ereira

Salisbury