NICK Harvey writes of Labour's legacy. It is in fact our legacy. Power is addictive, so governments give us what we want so that we will go on voting for them until the day we discover that this wasn't really what we wanted at all.

Every politician knows that you can only get away with offering blood, toil, tears and sweat when electors can see the whites of the enemy's eyes.

The present state of the world's economy owes its origin to the introduction of Reaganomics in the Eighties when the cry on all sides was, "cut the red tape". Banks and insurers take the reins. Building societies, wouldn't you just love to be banks and freed from all those pettifogging restriction on lending?

From time to time individual economies ran into trouble (our turn came in 1990) but just as long as everybody else was doing fine the worst was avoided.

Even so, Labour was elected in 1997 because house prices were still 20 per cent below the level they reached in 1989, so most home owners were without the spare (national) collateral required to cover the cost of borrowing to buy yet one more thing they didn't really need. Gordon Brown said just before he resigned that he should have taken action earlier. A bit of professional sophistry in which all politicians engage from time to time. He knows as well as I do that had he put a stop to 120 per cent mortgages the tabloid headlines would have screamed: "The nanny state strikes again", while whoever was the opposition leader at the time would have said: "How dare they say people don't know their own business best". By the way, I am still a staunch paid up member of the Labour Party, but I do live in the real world unlike some of my far left colleagues, the more successful we are in raising people's living standards the more protective conservatives we create.

HARRY SPARKS,

Homer Close,

Bratton Fleming.