SIR – Responding to Christopher Hindle’s letter (T&A, September 5), I’m happy to outline for him my political journey.

Long-held unease about the ever-multiplying stupidities arising from our membership of the EU, culminating in the single currency project attempting to turn Italians into fiscally-rigorous Germans and the events, both local and international, of 2001, led me to veer to the right, away from the Lib Dems.

I am currently deputy chairman of Shipley Constituency Conservatives. Glad to clear that up. From Mr Hindle’s last sentence, we see the Socialist answer to budget deficits – confiscatory top band income tax. At what level of salary? New Labour pinned that at £150,000 a year. Using the most recent available data – that for Fiscal Year ending April 2011 – there were 269,000 individuals with total income exceeding £150k, for a cumulative total of £92.3 billion, with about £51.95bn of that above the top rate threshold. Even an implausible outright theft tax of 100 per cent would only raise an extra £29bn, or about a quarter of the current deficit.

Only it wouldn’t, of course. Socialists have difficulty in grasping that 45 per cent of quite a lot tends to exceed 100 per cent of precious little.

Mike Pollard, Moorfield Drive, Baildon