WITH reference to the letter from Ron Clarke (May 22).

Trade unions have never recovered from Margaret Thatcher’s assault on their rights during the 1980s, and now without a strong trade union to stand up for the workers some businesses are able to pay such low wages that workers have to claim in-work benefits such as working tax credit.

This basically means that the taxpayers, which include some of us who are elderly, are subsidising big business by an estimated £11 billion.

Are we really comfortable with that!

The Conservative party managed to convince some of the electorate that the recent financial crisis was solely down to Labour party overspend.

If the electorate had done a bit of research and not taken the Conservatives' pre-election propaganda as gospel they might have found that, yes, Labour did overspend, but they didn’t create the mess that the banks left us in that led to the financial crisis.

Derek Summers

Malvern