T'S obvious from Alan Jones's recent anti-Labour rant (Planet Labour, Review April 10) that he's a Conservative. But surprising that, though so devoted to the cause, he preferred the Conservatives' Poll Tax to the Council Tax they replaced it with. He found his local £1,000 2010 Council Tax bill shockingly expensive.

Mine was rather more than that, and I was paying much more again in Income Tax, both of which I regarded as my proper contribution towards the services we enjoy as a community – from defence, NHS, education and so on, down to having my bins emptied regularly.

And as an unpaid director of a local care organisation I know how hard the Conservative freeze on Council Tax has made our own and local councils' tasks of providing care for vulnerable, profoundly handicapped people.

I remember the 60s and 70s better than Mr Jones. They didn't consist entirely of Labour governments - in almost half of those years we had Conservative governments and also about six months of a hung parliament.

They were difficult years for both parties. The following Conservative government had a much easier time of it, making one-off gains from what Harold Macmillan dismissed as "selling off the family silver" and from the windfall of North Sea oil.

None of this is relevant to my letter (Tory Myths, Review, March 27) which so animated Mr Jones. That explained the real reasons for the economic crash in 2008 and that the incoming 2010 coalition government perpetuated a fiction by claiming endlessly it was all the fault of the previous Labour government.

From 1997 until 2008 the UK economy was firmly under control – even George Osborne let that slip in his last budget speech.

US banking chaos then spread to the UK, leading to an enforced rescue of UK banks by the Labour government through an increase in public spending.

Alastair Darling's subsequent budget enabled growth to begin a slow recovery through 2009 and into 2010.

Then in 2010 the coalition government imposed massive spending cuts and talked down the recovery by over-emphasising the economic problems we faced, so individual and industrial spending shuddered to a halt and growth fell back.

Not until after the omnishambles budget of 2012, through surreptitious policy tweaks back to the original Darling Budget, did the economy begin to stagger to the stage it's at now – a growth rate around 2.5 per cent – where Darling had got it by 2010, but with over two years wasted in between.

Much remains to be done. As Robert Black (Clear account, Review, April 3) rightly pointed out, governments have unwisely allowed the City to "regulate" itself.

Although the Vickers Commission has proposed valuable reforms, the Tory half of the coalition managed to defer them to beyond 2019. They should start now.

Meantime my hope is to persuade the few dozen who read this letter to avoid voting tribally and think hard which party really has shown economic competence.

– David Norman, Blaisdon.