FOR many of us living in the Forest of Dean, the 'Economic Winter' has yet to bite hard. This is how recessions are. They start off patchy. A Woolworths here, a small engineering company there.

The Blair-Brown government made a virtue out of necessity with redundancy, focussing on retraining and re-employment. Rather than fighting against the rise and fall of businesses, they managed the process. That government's supporters would say that the country had never been better run.

There were problems with that approach, as is now apparent. The relentless economic growth shrunk the economic underclass from the Victorian proportions that were the legacy of Thatcherite slash-and-burn economics. In the Forest, as elsewhere, we benefited from that, rose out of Conservative austerity, and became used to Brownite prosperity.

Going around the Forest towns, leafleting in support of that very government, we noticed the change. Whether in Lydney, Coleford, Cinderford, Mitcheldean or smaller villages, during the working day, estates that had once been awash with the economic undead had become almost deserted as the once-unemployed were out earning their crust.

A much smaller group of those losing out and work refuseniks remains, more entrenched, unemployment hardened. Over the past year, the Brown government had made this group its stated target, but recent events have intervened.

The most discussed problem was the growth of debt. David Cameron and George Osborne have now set a moralistic face against the very notion, as if it were they that threw the usurpers from the temple. Yet where were they when the last Tory administration was increasing national borrowing?

Blair and Brown shepherded the economic good times along with a clear purpose. First they repaired the schools and hospitals that service our community, then they built new wards and classrooms and whole schools. They funded, we funded, a transformation inside those buildings, too. For a time, they were also able to reduce national debt.

But where were Mini-Cam and Highborn on this subject over the last five years? When they proposed cuts in spending and services, it was not to reduce debt, but to give it to the businessman, probably the same ones that attend their London gentlemen's club. Was this not the party that constantly argued for reducing bureaucratic controls, when now everyone seems to agree that we should have been doing the opposite?

What we all want to know now is what will be best for the country and the Forest area over the next few years, and neither party offers an attractive prospect. Labour promises to do its best with our and our children's money to keep the economy moving as best it can. The Tories suggest that we take the medicine now, or rather we let the economic fever take its course.

Labour offers to fight to keep economic activity up, while the Tory alternative seems to require quite dramatic cuts in the services we depend upon, whether local buses, refuse collection, road repairs, care services, environmental health, tourist information, though as the big spenders we might expect health and education to be the worst hit, as in their previous administrations.

Not far from here is the Welsh valley where my mother grew up. It was decimated by Thatcher and has yet to recover. I suggested recently in these columns that to be a 'core Conservative' you had to be intellectually and psychologically blinkered, to be emotionally unaware of the collateral damage of your simplistic economic policies.

What I see now is the same thing happening again. The Tories may or may not be aware of the sheer devastation their policies or lack of them would have for our community. What is clear is that they do not care.

The 'Core Conservative', as exemplified by letters in these columns, is generally economically simple-minded, focussed on his own wealth and career, militaristic and euro-sceptic, suspicious of and unsympathetic to those different from himself. This is why my letters to this august journal have come back time and again to one question: what does our Conservative Member of Parliament, Mark Harper, believe? With his opponent, honest Forester Bruce Hogan, what you see is what you get, but when will Mark show his true colours?

There was a time when he stood unsuccessfully for this parlimentary seat and his election communications showed all the hallmarks of the rabid right-winger. We asked did this mean that he held even more extreme right-wing views jingoism, racism, homophobia? I have asked these questions in these columns and received no clear answer, though it is easy to give. Is he the pure-bred right-winger that he once seemed proud to be? Does he support a long winter of unemployment for the Forest as the only proper course of action?

Mark Harper, I hazard, will continue to prevaricate, to play the political game, until he is forced by public opinion to show his hand. This will only happen when the intelligent editorship of this and other Forest publications clearly and repeatedly insists that he does so. We need to know, as it is relevant to all our futures. – Roger Brewis, Bells Place, Coleford.