DOESN’T your report of the OECD warning “UK to have one of the highest inflation rates of any developed economy” (Jun 7) send chills down our financial backs?

The OECD tells us that at 6.9% inflation (we’re still to get there) the Tories will have delivered the highest inflation of any major developed economy but, great news, we should avoid recession? Really?

Is that the recession mortgage payers are experiencing as the costs of their homes are rising while wages have fallen under the Tories’ 13 years of mis-governance with little prospect of recovery, and prices across the board are being hiked at unprecedented rates?

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Or the recession being felt by the working poor, for many of whom even having a mortgage is a pipe dream and subject to inordinate rent increases, struggling to survive in the cesspool of Tory economic greed and incompetence and forced to endure the indignity of resorting to food banks – the Tories’ contemporary poor houses and their only growth area, their return to Victorian “values”?

Or the recession endured by those forced into the welfare system through ill-health, denied remedy from the NHS because years of mismanagement, financial waste and political tinkering with private health care have reduced its effectiveness (eg £50 charge for private ear-syringing)?

Of course, it’s the pandemic to blame – except all of the developed countries with lower inflation rates were subjected to the same pandemic strictures.

And it’s the war in Ukraine that has caused the energy crisis. But only because we’ve allowed electricity generation, which we produce on fixed rates and whose generation costs are not substantially increased, to be tied to the carbon fuel market which unsurprisingly still increased profits for producers, rather than curtailing them.

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And also of course, it has nothing to do with the elephant in the room that’s the Brexit we know is restricting exports of fresh produce, and starving us of the essential labour our agricultural and hospitality industries are crying out for.

The Tories always think they’re right. Yet it’s they who have held the ball for 13 years, they who have restricted wages, they who have underfunded our public services and they who have reaped the reward of tax breaks for their pals, and refused to rein in the interests of their party donors like the energy companies that are being allowed to wallow in grotesquely huge profits which the government is subsidising with public money; just like us giving taxpayers’ money directly to shareholder dividends.

The arch financial villain, Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt, says he would back the Bank of England raising interest rates to bring inflation under control even if it meant pushing the UK into a recession. So the scam continues.

But it’s not millionaire Hunt and his rich cronies who will bear the brunt of his cavalier attitude to restricting public and personal finances, it’s everyone who works for their living, is dependent on fixed incomes and/or benefits, and the small business enterprises struggle to keep their heads above the Tories’ sewage-filled economic waters we’re all drowning in.

Surely we Scots must realise by now that matters are never going to improve under Tory government we don’t vote for, that a Labour party with no intention of rectifying the Tories’ damage will not deliver a change to prosperity, and there’s no prospect of economic Valhalla from either blue or red Tory government and their UK Union.

Shouldn’t it be socially unacceptable for all Scots not to vote for the full control of independence so we can sort it for ourselves?

Jim Taylor
Edinburgh