Alice in Wonderland Mark Harper's got his back to the

wall, or more accurately the bark of a Dean oak. And if the

letters pages are anything to go by, his front's on the

receiving end of enough body-blows to make a bantam

weight boxer want to rear chickens for a living instead.

No sentient being can quarrel with the importance of

getting the budget deficit under control ASAP, but when

he uses that as an excuse for failing to fulfil yet another

Conservative Party pre-election pledge – this time it's the

promise to bring in a fuel duty stabiliser – he merely adds

more fuel to the bonfire of broken pre-election Tory

promises.

The UK has the second highest diesel price in Europe

where, on average, a litre of diesel is made up of 51 per

cent product price and 49 per cent tax whilst the average

in this country is 38 per cent product price and 62 per

cent tax. And as fuel duty rises to a record level further

pressure is put on struggling small firms who will have

little choice but to pass the cost onto customers who are

already struggling to deal with the VAT hike.

In this Alice in Wonderland called UK plc, where

small businesses struggle to cope with a deluge of

regulations spewing forth from the Tower of Babel, where

more non-European migrants are accepted than in any

other EU country, where foreigners take two out of three

new jobs, where an army of human rights lawyers is busy

defending convicted criminals and terrorists at a cost to

the taxpayer of over £100 million, where the government

wastes millions of taxpayers' money complying with New

Labour's Equality Act (if you can explain why the Tories

should spend £100,000 on investigating the effect of

boosting Britain's coastal fish stocks on the Chinese, the

disabled, gays and lesbians then as Kipling put it, 'you're

a better man than I am Gunga Din'), where the 20 biggest

corporations operate more than 1,000 subsidiaries in off-

shore tax havens to avoid paying tax, where the banks

and the energy companies have us over a barrel, where

the government tries to sell us what we already own ...it's

hardly surprising that Britain's real share holders – its

long suffering citizens – feel betrayed by an unholy

alliance of bloated Brussels bureaucrats and whining

Westminster MPs who, with a few honourable exceptions,

deserve to be despatched, much like Peter Sellers' piano

player in Balham, Gateway to the South, to Benidorm, or

the Black Sea, or the Bay of Biscay... or anywhere far

enough away for them to practice their Lib/Lab/ Con trick

without disturbing the rest of us.

Three things are certain in this life. Taxes, death and

a Britain which will barely survive, let alone thrive, so long

as the bureaucrats have their hands on our windpipes.

Mark Harper may be no Alice but he would do

himself and all of us a favour if he took time off from his

current debacle to step through the looking glass and then

let us know whether he still believes in that other long

running fairy tale, the Tory fantasy called 'In Europe but

not run by Europe.'

Because if he still does and his fellow politicians

continue to deny us an EU referendum the reality for us

will be 'In Europe and run over by Europe.'

– John Muir, Newnham.