IN LABOUR’S newspaper Local Voice – York Council Budget Special edition, I could not find any mention of the Three Rs.

Regret for starting the recession during the Blair, and then Brown, administration; accept any responsibility for leaving the nation on the verge of bankruptcy as the new coalition Government wrestles to sort out the economic mess; or remorse for the hardship that the country will have to endure.

Admittedly the banks did not help the situation, but they certainly did not start it. New Labour went about spending taxpayers’ money in a profligate manner, and then blamed everybody but themselves for economic downturn that followed.

At the Dispatch Box recently, Red Ed Miliband, bankrolled by the unions, read his response to the Chancellor’s Budget from his blank sheet of paper.

And so York’s Labour councillors answer to the city’s financial crisis is a “War on Waste”, but like so many socialist remedial suggestions throughout the country at local level in particular, it is entirely ideologically based to expose hurt, rather than economically driven to mitigate the pain.

Geoffrey Widdows Conservative candidate Dringhouses and Woodthorpe ward, East Mount Road, York.