Councillor Susanna Pressel’s letter (ViewPoints, December 10) continues a charming but silly trend by Oxford leftists of not only denying economic truths but also flaunting their wilful ignorance.

Economics and finance can be both boring and complex but surely we should expect our elected representatives to have some basic understanding of such issues?

I hope Cllr Pressel won’t be offended if I point out that Keith Mitchell, with a background in business and accounting, has a good grip on numbers.

Perhaps she and other Labour councillors might be helped if they were to absorb three facts about the UK economy, not interpretations or opinions, and in doing so accept a more sensible basis for debate about the national background to our local city and county finances: 1. The UK budget deficit is 12.6 per cent of GDP, worse than any other major economy, worse than even Ireland and Greece, both now effective financial failures.

2. Our total national debt has risen to over 64.5 per cent of GDP. Some would argue the real figure should be 103.5 per cent of GDP if we include private finance intiatives and pension liabilities.

3. The bank bailout has cost roughly 10 per cent of that total national debt – a huge figure but still only part of the problem.

Now let’s interpret those statistics, always dangerous but we have to try to draw some conclusions from such a disastrous situation.

Cllr Pressel is certainly right that most of the banks have been both utterly immoral and irresponsible, but the cost of bailing them out is only a fraction of our deficit.

In fact, as a nation, we were in surplus until 2002 when Gordon Brown, the then Chancellor, opened the spending taps.

By the time the international wave hit our boat in 2007-8, it was already leaking and full of water.

As the Office for National Statistics notes: “Deficits have been recorded since 2002-3”.

It’s important that we realise that this downturn isn’t simply an industrial recession that we have experienced before, bad though they might have been.

We are living through what former Chancellor Alastair Darling rightly called a depression, a traumatically deflated asset-bubble, that we are only surviving so well as a result of massive injections of liquidity – medicine that may leave us with serious inflationary side-effects later.

Mending these problems will take years.

Our share of the national debt means that each worker in the UK now owes the equivalent of £33,000 before we take any account of our own mortgages and commitments.

The decisions necessary to cut spending are extremely painful for everyone involved, regardless of their political beliefs.

None of us could fairly blame Cllr Pressel personally for our desperate situation but we could point out that she represents a party which was in charge and which yet again, grossly mismanaged our economy.

Would it be too much to ask her and others for a period of quiet and humility while others get on and repair the damage?

Jonathan Gittos, Wolvercote