IN reply to "Objective Englishman" (Your Letters, Sept 17) may I say that we know that debts display inefficiency as the Tories left us with a National Debt of £34bn in 1997. This had to be cleared by the policies of our prudent chancellor Gordon Brown.

There is no correlation between party funds and the national budget. Yes, probably we should finance elections from taxation because we could never ever find out where the Tories got their money from.

Perhaps "Objective Englishman" could explain to us how the Major-Lamont duo managed to lose us £19bn in one day in 1992 when leaving the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM).

J. HOLDEN, St Paul's Street, Ramsbottom.