I’d like to explain a couple of things following on from last week’s letters. First, the letter by Ashley Forsyth – Why can the government inconvenience the public? (Keighley News, August 15) – was a predictable piece of left-wing ideological claptrap.

It is ridiculous in the extreme to suggest the deficit is a fiction.

His ill-informed and foolish views do not warrant further attention.

Secondly, in response to people’s understandable alarm at having volunteers cover for the planned union strike of fire-fighters – Huge implications for strike-breakers (Keighley News, August 22).

Who is to blame for this potentially dangerous state of affairs?

Some blame what they call ‘Tory cuts’. But we must resist reaching for seemingly immediate causes for these problems. It has taken many years to reach the situation we are in today.

It has been seen that official crime figures are at their lowest for years.

The police are doing their job better than ever before. And this is despite the budget reductions brought in by the coalition.

All types of crime are down. Britain is safer now than it has been in living memory.

But without the budget deficit from the previous Labour administration, it is inconceivable the Conservatives would have cut police departments. Instead, crime would be even lower.

It would also have been stupid for the coalition to cut fire service provision, were it not for the necessary deficit reduction programme.

As it stands, these drastic measures have been forced on a government that inherited enormous spending commitments and debts from the Labour mess that clung on to power before.

So to come to an understanding today, we need to look at why we were willing to vote for such a morally dubious Labour government back in 2001, 2005 and 2010.

A Conservative government would have prevented any cuts to fire-fighting by now.

Leo Robinson Skipton Road Keighley