‘TORIES strengthen grip on county’ (Hereford Times election coverage, May 14). This is hardly surprising given that the county is a naturally Conservative region and was presumably affected, like the rest of the country, by the raucous campaign of anti-Miliband denigration orchestrated by the Murdoch media empire and the other ghastly tabloids that satisfy the intellectual needs of the great English reading public.

This would be fine supposing the Conservative party had remained true to its principles. But it has not.

Conservative principles have been displaced by an alien monetarist creed which is revolutionary by nature and divisively anti-social in its effects.

Thatcherism, with its insistence that everything in life is worthwhile only if it can render a monetary profit, is a concept that is foreign to a true Conservative philosophy just as Blairism is a parody of socialism. Neo-liberalism is the name and it is a blight on the body politic. Like smallpox, perhaps.

I predict that by 2020 the NHS will be totally in private hands and that, given our ‘small’ government’s refusal to implement an equitable tax regime and to continue to sanction tax evasion on a grand scale, revenue will have to come from a reliable captive source: VAT at 25%. Any bets?

‘Austerity’, which has been reduced or abandoned in the other developed nations, remains the holy grail of that smooth pair, Osborne and Cameron and this is the agenda that the electorate has signed up to! A giant con trick.

As a last point, may I point out that while Miliband’s faculties might not include strong political leadership gifts, he at least had the decency to repudiate the loathsome Murdoch, something that Cameron definitely did not!

MARTIN F BARNETT Glover Road, Leominster