Gordon Black fails to take into account Tory failures - Yorkshire Post Letters

Re: We owe it to next generation to halt decline (Gordon Black, page 18, The Yorkshire Post, February 7).

Try as I might I cannot agree with Gordon Black that the Conservatives did more good than bad in their long period of power.

It was characterised first by damaging public service cuts by Messrs Cameron and Osborne that did real damage to the NHS and public services generally. They topped that by political infighting, naked ambition and a loss of direction.

Boris Johnson's time as Prime Minister was a shambles with bogus promises of "oven ready" solutions that turned out to be nothing of the sort.

Liz Truss's brief reign saw a disastrous loss of confidence in the bond markets unlike anything seen before so Rishi Sunak's administration could never attain any momentum, even if he had the ideological will to succeed, which I doubt.

I also wonder about his claim that the Conservatives failed to deliver on the benefits of Brexit though as I have previously pointed out the Conservatives badly messed up leave negotiations.

It is strange that at the time they had very few critics from the right of British politics. Only now has the mess become noticed in those circles.

Whilst I have been a long term sceptic of the value of first the Common Market and then the EU, I am coming to the view that leaving the EU was ill thought out.

It was dangerously naive of Conservatives to think Britain had a whip hand over a much larger EU.

Like Gordon Black I remain an optimist. However, that optimism is, I hope, tempered with realism about the state the Conservative left Britain in.