I am writing to rebut the ludicrous assertions of Steve Davison in his letter last week – Response to the flooding is just electoral hypocrisy (Keighley News, February 20).

While the government is doing all it can to tackle the floods on the Somerset Levels, Labour’s Unite union officers are complaining about spending money on a ‘Tory South’, as he calls it.

When it is his Unite union and other unions that fund 80 per cent of the Labour party and have been caught rigging the votes of party selections of candidates for Westminster, I cannot accept the hypocrisy of Mr Davison talking about buying votes.

How many overpaid champagne socialists do we pay for in the Environment Agency for example?

Or what about those public sector millionaires working in the NHS, such as the NHS England quango?

Rather than blaming the government for the international price of gas or the price of imported food, I suggest the real social injustice is the disparity of pay between public sector and private sector employees.

In 2010, that gap was eight per cent privilege on public payroll! It will take years before this pay gap is bridged and the burden on taxpayers abates.

Furthermore, this coalition government is completely unable to buy votes even here in the ‘Tory North’. As the departing Treasury Secretary, Liam Byrne, wrote on a note at number eleven for incoming Chancellor Osborne to see in 2010: ‘Sorry, there is no money left. Liam’.

Ever since, the challenge has been to reduce our massive deficit and stave off economic disaster, the likes of which we have not seen since 1974 to 1979.

Leo Robinson Church Street, Keighley