THIS coalition Government may well break the record for the shortest honeymoon period in history.

With the recent budget, VAT increase, job losses, lack of inward investment, reduction in manufacturing, increased unemployment, pension and retirement changes, I will be amazed if it survives a full term.

I understand the country is in dire financial difficulties and that measures will “affect every one of us”. Apparently, ‘we’ all have to tighten our belts. Who is this ‘we’? As usual, in order to reduce the financial deficit it will be necessary to make the less well off even worse off.

The wealthy will carry on business as usual. The banking industry has already warned the new Government about too much financial regulation.

Let’s not forget the bankers are responsible for our predicament, not only the previous government.

As for the LibDems, their collusion in the VAT increase is the biggest political betrayal of the electorate in our history. If they wish to consign their party to the dustbin of history then they go the right way about it.

I shall not be voting for them in any election ever again.

C Urquhart, Millfield Road, York.

• THE recent budget reflects a Government which has no compassion for the most vulnerable in our society, the disabled – for it is they who rely most heavily on the Disability Living Allowance.

By imposing a medical assessment, it is predicted to save the government £1.4 billion by 2015. But we have already seen what havoc past medical assessments have done.

Call me Mr Cynical, but when you are suffering from terminal cancer or suffer from Parkinson’s, the working practice of these “checks” can degenerate into a blinkered vision of saving Treasury expenditure.

All the disabled want anyway is a hand-up, not a handout. Is that too impossible to ask for? The litmus test for any civilised society must be the care of its most vulnerable.

Phil Shepherdson, Chantry Close, Woodthorpe, York.