Dear Editor – There has been a range of factors behind the credit crunch, which has already caused a number of banks to fail and which is having a direct impact on the lives of ordinary people.

Among those factors has been the way in which banks parcelled up their mortgage debts and sold them on. This had two effects – one was that no-one was sure any longer how much bad debt any bank had, not even the banks themselves. And the second was that speculators have been allowed to gamble in the debts, thus making the situation worse.

Another factor has been what is known as short-selling. This was probably a new concept to most of us – but basically it means that speculators have been gambling by selling shares that they never owned in order to drive the price down. They then buy them back again and pocket the difference.

Nice work if you can get it – although most of us would hardly call it work.

It emerged that a hedge fund which has been directly involved in trading mortgage debts and short selling financial institutions has donated £40,000 from its profits to the Conservative Party in this constituency. That’s a considerable sum of money, and I doubt that any other party fighting the next election will be able to spend anything like as much as that.

There is nothing currently illegal about this, but voters will surely draw their own conclusions about whether it is entirely moral for a political party to benefit from the sort of activity which is causing misery for millions.

John Dixon Plaid Cymru Parliamentary candidate for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire