SIR,

I was dismayed to learn the other day that Britain's trade deficit is now running at about £50 billion a year! This is quite a lot of cash. It actually means that each British household is spending on average about £2,000 too much on imported goods every year. In the meantime, Mr Brown, by cutting taxes, is effectively throwing more money at the British consumer - which will inevitably be spent largely on increasing the balance of payments deficit even further, instead of stimulating our own economy. The poor old government are pretty helpless trying to support our economy, because they cannot interfere too much in the way consumers spend their money.

The government can't, or daren't, impose import restrictions because this would be protectionist, even illegal with regard to the EU, and send completely the wrong signals to international investors. The only solution to the problem is for consumers themselves voluntarily to support British manufacturers by buying home-produced goods. This is very difficult on the whole, since we don't produce in this country most of the consumer items we buy.

However, we do produce some things - in particular, food and drink, for example. So, next time you go down to the local shops, why not buy that piece of haddock from the North Sea instead of the Sea Bass from the South Pacific, a nice locally grown cabbage instead of that pack of beans from somewhere across the water, and a bottle or two of ale brewed in the Wye Valley instead of those cans of foreign lager?

Each family only needs to replace £20 worth of imported goods each week with local produce, and you have done your bit for the country. If everyone made a conscious effort, the trade deficit problem would be solved within a short time, our own local economy would be stimulated automatically, unemployment reduced, and the recession might soon be thing of the past,

Anthony Owen