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Amelia Gentleman writes a great story (Report, 25 February), but she sets out only one political point of view, and forgets that politics is about choices and priorities. The "it's all the coalition's fault" subtext just doesn't wash. The Labour government didn't have to spend massively on public services, creating a structural deficit years before the banking crisis – it chose to. They didn't have to pursue greater financial deregulation, adding billions to the bailout bills, either.
And as the spending tide goes out, Camden council is not obliged blindly to cut frontline services: these are local Labour councillors' choices and priorities. The opposition budget we put forward – and approved as affordable by the council's finance director – would keep our older people's day centres open instead of closing them. There is an alternative.
Cllr Chris Naylor
Camden council
• The dismay and anger felt by council workers in Camden and elsewhere as government-induced cuts damage services and cost jobs are understandable. But Andrew Baisley's criticism of Camden's Labour councillors for failing to translate "rhetorical opposition to the government into meaningful resistance" (Letters, 26 February) is misplaced. Just what sort of meaningful resistance does he envisage – emulating those councils which failed to raise a rate in the 1980s? That way lies political disaster, a gift to the government and no impact on the ground.
Labour councillors up and down the country are facing impossible choices; they can only do their utmost to shield their communities from the most damaging cuts, in co-operation, wherever possible, with the workforce and the voluntary and community sector.
Jeremy Beecham
Labour, House of Lords
• Why is it that every time a member of the coalition speaks they repeat the mantra "Gordon Brown wrecked the economy"? Either our former PM was omnipotent – managing to wreck the economies of Iceland, Greece, Ireland, and three-quarters of the rest of the world in one fell swoop, or this is simply not true. Could it be greedy and self-seeking financial institutions that wrecked the economy? The ones which continue to pay obscene bonuses, to fund the Conservative party (50% of all its funds from the City), and who continue to avoid tax to such staggering levels that if just one of them paid the correct level of tax (Barclays), it would cover 60% of the alleged level of benefit fraud that this government is so keen on confronting.
Andrew Harris
Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire
