Dear Sir Kier

After 14 years of Conservative administration in which many things were not well managed it is not surprising that the country voted for change. You have repeatedly made this point implying that the change they wanted was for Labour government but that is not the case. The Labour share of the vote was less than 34%, just over one third. This was the lowest vote share for any political party forming a post-war majority government. Turnout was the lowest in recent memory with less than 60% of the electorate voting. The actual percentage of the electorate who voted Labour was only just over 20% which means that nearly 80% did not. If only one in five of the electorate voted for you you have no mandate for anything. There were over 50 parties fielding candidates in this year's general election, almost certainly a record and it is clear there is deep frustration in the land with the leadership that any government is applying and that certainly includes yours. Already just four months after you were elected opinion polls are showing the Labour party is no longer in the lead, such is the dissatisfaction with the progress you have made to date.

Your decision to take away the winter fuel allowance from numerous pensioners was a clear own goal as many pensioners and charities who represent them are saying that for a large number they will have to choose between eating and heating.  I also get the winter fuel allowance or did until now and though I probably don't need it I take the view that I'm paying such a high level of tax - my marginal rate of tax is 62.5 percent- that at least I am getting something back however small is the sum.  You have made claims that the Labour government has inherited the worst set of economic conditions since the war. That is certainly not true. First of all the rate of growth at the time of the election was the highest in the G7. After the last Conservative budget in March this year the forecast rate of growth for the economy over the next five years by independent agencies was 8.5%. After the budget that your Chancellor announced last week the same agency forecast the rate of growth over the next five years as 8.2%. Your emphasis on growth as being your prime goal is already failing to deliver.

You have been repeating that you found a black hole of £22 billion once you were in government. This is pure fiction and no independent commentator has confirmed it. Ministers don’t produce the accounts. Independent officials do. Of the £22 billion £10 billion was in pay rises to various unions -your paymasters-  agreed by your government without obtaining any improvements in productivity in return. You have also been somewhat misleading when you claim that your government has secured £63 billion of investment from major international firms. Over £50 billion of this had already been promised by the same companies to the previous government.

The budget was truly a Marxist budget full of class warfare. You have introduced the expression ‘working person’ and failed to define it in any sense of meaning. it would seem that in your world a doctor is not a working person when in fact he may work more hours in a day than you do. I am retired and have been for four years now but I still regard myself as a working person because I still work. I don't work for money anymore but I work to help various civic organisations in the City of London and various charities that I have helped support not just through signing cheques but by raising money and giving other advice based on my long experience in business. I worked for money for over 50 years and all that time worked long hours. For much of my career I spent a lot of time travelling to overseas markets and have in fact done business in over 50 countries living for a period in two of them. I never worked just five-day weeks or 8-hour days.  I did the work that was required however long it took. But in your book I was not a working person because I have some savings but I worked hard for those all my life. When I started work after leaving university my father had arranged for me to have an overdraft from his bank just to get me started. I paid that off in a few months. I've never had any debt since other than mortgages on my homes backed of course by the assets themselves and credit card accounts which of course are technically debt but I pay them off in full every month and never had to pay any interest on them. But in your world I'm not a working person. You don't understand what work is and you and your team don't understand economics. Your budget has increased both the debt which was already at its highest ever and the expenditure.

There are many reasons why you will fail to achieve your objectives. There are some clear structural problems and Labour Party politics has never been able to deal with any of them. Every Labour government since the war has left the economy in a worse state than it found it without exception. The only Labour government in history that achieved some economic progress was the first one a hundred years ago but it only lasted nine months and is really not a fair test. One place to start would be to have proper accounts. The Office for National Statistics treats anything the government spends money on as investment if it has an asset life of more than 12 months. That allows many items to be called investment when they are simply capital maintenance including even fixing potholes. More and more spending on the NHS is called investment when it really isn't investment. Investment in the NHS would mean the building of new hospitals, installation of more modern equipment, the development of new technologies and investment in research and development. The debt position is not sustainable and anything that is not sustainable will not be sustained.

A dash for net zero is actually counterproductive as virtually all the equipment required for renewable energy generation is imported largely from China whether it's solar panels or the steel that goes into a wind farm. Your arbitrary target of building 300,000 houses per year is impossible to achieve. There is not the capacity nor the labour unless we import all of that. We were able to build 300,000 houses a year after the Second World War. Much of that was social housing in urban areas and as part of planned new towns. Private house builders have no obvious interest in building this large number of houses which would certainly be less profitable than their normal products. House building is particularly energy and carbon intensive so building 1.5 million houses cannot avoid increasing global warming.

In the election campaign you seriously misled the country when you said you would not increase National Insurance. You have increased it perhaps not directly on the employee but certainly on the employer. An employer faced with higher costs running into many billions at the national level will have few options. They can reduce the number of staff or increase prices but that is not possible in areas like doctors’ surgeries which are charged this tax. Some may withdraw altogether from the business feeling it's not worthwhile with this and all the other costs that are being thrown at them.

Countries that have introduced wealth taxes - which I know you have not yet done but I suspect you have considered it and you're doing it in a roundabout way - included Mitterrand’s socialist government which introduced a wealth tax. The consequence was that about 400,000 French people left the country and the tax take of the French government went down rather than up. The same thing happened when a Labour government in Norway introduced a wealth tax. The very richest Norwegians all left the country and went to countries like Switzerland where they felt more welcome and the Norwegian total tax revenue declined.  Needless to say both countries have withdrawn that measure and anyone sensible who follows this and other examples would realise that it always fails
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I live in a valuable house with my wife but the house does not produce any cash. It takes quite a lot of money to maintain and occasionally repair and if we were faced with a wealth tax on our property since the house produces no cash we would have to sell other things like shares and since there will be many people in that position that means the stock market would inevitably go down.
Every Labour government brings forward these sorts of ideas and every Labour government as a result fails to see genuine investment or genuine growth in the economy. Our debt position gets worse and as I say this is not sustainable so there will be a heavy reckoning in the not-too-distant future.