SIR – The extended Christmas break says more about this country than we may realise.

Logically, one would think that taking extended breaks from work at a time of financial crisis would be the worst thing to do – not in a monetarist economy it isn’t. British manufacturing is in such a lamentable state, following 20 years of successive Tory governments (followed by ten years of closet Tories) that the thinking is: when people are not at ‘work,’ they ‘produce’ for the capitalists by ‘consuming’ their goods and services (ie spending).

Unfortunately, in many cases, this is being done with money they do not have from credit card companies and repaying at an extortionate rate of interest.

For those who are dispossessed, consumerism is still available with ‘pay-day loans’,or ‘logbook loans’ or perhaps that other growth industry, pawn-broking.

The recent T&A article on this very subject reveals that although certainly a growth industry in the UK, pawnbrokers in the US have never had it so good. This is because the two countries that most avidly swallowed the obscene and shallow monetarist economic policies of Milton Friedman in the 1980s are the two whose poorest are picking up the cost of its catastrophic failure.

Christopher Hindle, Osterley Grove, Bradford