WHEN David Cameron said last week that he 'wanted people to think it's worth it, that rain sodden trip to the polling station...because you get to choose who governs you, and that is something people in this country have died for...' was he deluded or was he, not for the first time, deceiving us?

It is a deceit for David Cameron to pretend that the democratic freedom our ancestors fought to save is compatible with his much trumpeted support for our membership of the European Union project.

This is a project which openly intends to undermine national sovereignty by turning each formerly free European nation into a trans-European and servile hybrid state beholden only to an unelected and corrupt bureaucracy in Brussels.

The enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth which corrupts democracy and with it the commonwealth and local communities which are its foundation.

Four hundred years ago the Stuart monarchy's enthusiasm for wealthy court favourites like the Duke of Buckingham, expensive foreign wars and arbitrary taxation paved the way for Civil War and Charles I's beheading, blinded as he was by self-regard and devotion to the divine right of kings.

So David Cameron's appetite for selfies, foreign wars, stealth taxes, dodgy Tory Party donors, and for 'shows of strength' for wealthy court favourites like Maria Miller and his metropolitan clique sounds familiar; which suggests his coalition, blinded by the profane right of politicians, rules the nation in its own interests, as though Britain were just an asset up for sale and not a civilisation whose citizens have memories, hopes and dreams.

Just as many emerging middle class Britons in 1642 were unable to believe an untrustworthy King Charles, so are many 'squeezed middle' citizens in 2014 struggling to find a reason to trust David Cameron in the run-up to next year's general election.

So Mark Harper, when you consider how you might defend your party's treatment of the wealthy and the vulnerable, beware the Ides of May! Because there are some interesting and uncomfortable comparisons to be made between 1642 and 2014, between Charles's divine right and politicians' profane right, bet­ween Charles's episcopacy and Cameron's plutocracy, between Charles's Ship Money and Cameron's Council Tax, between the Scottish Covenanters and the Scottish National Party, between the Star Chamber and the Magistrates Court, between the Puritans and the Evangelical Christians, and between bankrupt national exchequers and ... bankrupt national exchequers.

And the weather in the 17th century was every bit as turbulent as it is now.

– John Muir, Newnham.