I AM surprised Jim Foley, the author of a recently published letter, felt motivated to accuse me of “playing petty politics” in response to a letter that I also had published in this newspaper.

My letter had been a reaction to the usual rosy update from Sajid Javid MP trying to persuade us that he and his boss, George Osborne, had achieved an economic miracle in relation to their management of the UK economy.

It probably feels like an economic miracle if you are the beneficiary of the reduction in income tax from 50p to 45p under his Government or if you are a banker who has experienced a massive increase in your bonuses since May 2010.

For the rest of us ordinary people, their management of the UK economy has been an economic disaster.

Mr Foley claims “Labour left this country a toxic legacy”, and also that “the national debt more than doubled under Labour”.

In 1997 when Labour came to office they inherited a debt of 42% of GDP. By the start of the global banking crises in 2008 the debt had fallen to 35% – a near 22% reduction.

The debt and deficit subsequently mushroomed because of the global banking crisis, which triggered an instant collapse in output and tax revenues. Labour had to borrow more to bail out the banks and because suddenly and unavoidably less money was coming in. The recession was made on Wall Street, not Downing Street.

Ironically, the current Government has borrowed more in three years than Labour did in 13 years. In fact, they are now borrowing £200 billion more than planned due to their failed austerity policy, which crashed the growth they inherited from Labour in 2010 and then flat-lined the economy for over three years.

They will have doubled the national debt by 2015 to £1.5 trillion.

This is also the slowest recovery for over 100 years.

It had been forecasts the economy would have grown by 6.9 per cent by now. It has only just grown by 1.7 per cent since 2010. Mr Foley had actually claimed that under a new Labour Government “there would be more borrowing, more spending and more debt. That is the reality under this Conservative-led Government.

Mr Foley boasts about the impressive number of private sector jobs created by this Government since 2010.

He failed to mention the large number of jobs they slashed in the public sector. The total number of unemployed in the UK in May 2010 when they came to power was recorded as 2.47 million people.

It peaked at 2.68 million in October 2011. By October 2013 the number of unemployed had reduced to 2.39 million, not much of a reduction from the figure they inherited in 2010.

Mr Foley scaremongers that a future Labour Government could lead to increased unemployment. In May 1997 Labour inherited unemployment of 2.05 million. By September 2004 it was reduced to 1.4 million and remained well under 2 million until November 2008, when the effects of the global banking crisis began to take hold.

Labour’s record for controlling unemployment is much better than the record of the current Government.

If Mr Foley would like me to stop playing petty politics then maybe he could encourage Mr Javid not to regularly misrepresent the facts about the economy. He might also suggest that ex-banker Mr Javid stops blaming the previous Labour Government for the global banking crisis that was caused by the mismanagement of the banking sector by his former colleagues.

Sorry if that sounds petty.

BERNARD McELDOWNEY Lickey End