I STARTED to read the letter from Councillor G Kirby, obviously with concern for the large number of people in debt.

Then, as all Labour councillors have been doing week in week out since 2010, heis to totally blames this problem on the current Coalition Government. I am no great fan of the Coalition, but as with all Labour supporters, not one of them accepts or even acknowledges that the austerity measures would not have been necessary if Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who remember, ran the government for 13 years, had not made a complete hash of things.

They totally failed to control the greedy bankers, they virtually gave away masses of our gold reserves, they created unmanageable national and local bureaucracies which were totally unsustainable. They wasted billions of pounds, which the country could not afford, and were responsible for the death of thousands of people in a war in Iraq which was at the whim of the Labour leader Tony Blair. A mess which is now coming back to haunt us in an unimaginable way.

Cllr Kirby also fails to acknowledge that here in Wales, Labour have made a similar big mess of things. He seems to forget that Labour have been in government from the beginning of the Assembly.

I say to all you Labour politicians in Wales: for crying out loud, admit it once and for all, you have failed us all miserably. In particular, you failed the poorest, weakest and most vulnerable in Wales, who have suffered the most. You have no right to criticise others when you fail to acknowledge your own party’s mistakes.

DJ Pritchard Rowan Way, Newport