The Tories are not at fault for the fall in living standards - Yorkshire Post Letters

When Rachel Reeves (June 21) refers to "the first Parliament on record with living standards lower than et the start" (not actually true), she must realise that the main causes of this fall in living standards were an unforeseen coronavirus pandemic and measures designed to cope with it.

Of course living standards have fallen because lockdown prevented millions of people from doing their normal work.

Of course prices have risen because, during furlough, huge sums of money were manufactured to pay millions of people for not doing their jobs.

Pandemic restrictions were also responsible for huge increases in hospital waiting lists.

Did the HM government handle this crisis well? With hindsight, probably not.

Would Sir Keir Starmer's team have done any better? Not at all. Sir Keir, at that time, had called for longer lockdown and more furlough.

Rachel Reeves repeats a myth that Elizabeth Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng "crashed the economy, sent mortgages spiralling and put pensions in peril".

Because of the poor timing of Kwasi Kwarteng's financial statement, he was wrongly blamed for mortgage interest increases that were already bound to happen.

Incompetence by the independent Monetary Committee had kept interest rates unduly low for too long. This made many people believe that rates would stay low and it pushed up house prices by misleading buyers' into taking on too much debt.

Similarly it was pension fund trustees and their advisers who "put pensions in peril" by unwisely entering into Liability Derived Investments.

We shall now never know whether, more skillfully handled, their policy of reducing tax rates to boost productivity would have actually increased tax revenue as it did for Nigel Lawson and others.