If we don't fight we could lose everything we hold dear warns Leigh Wood in response to the district council's proposed Northern Quarter development. Which begs the question, what do we hold dear?

A Tale of Two Britains, just published by Oxfam, reports that the five richest families in the country own more than the bottom 20 per cent of the population.

Recent events in Ukraine remind us that extreme inequalities create dangerous resentment; and it's not the first time that such concentrations of wealth for the protection of the powerful have threatened social cohesion in Britain.

'The Condition of England is justly regarded as one of the most ominous,' wrote Thomas Carlyle in 1843 when he began to map the changing moral, political and economic state of the nation.

'England is full of wealth, of multifarious produce, supply for human want in every kind,' he said, 'yet England is dying of inanition!'

When Carlyle cast a jaundiced eye over mid-19th century England's 'enchanted wealth' and asked: but which of us has it enriched? he might just as well have been passing judgement on early 21st century England whose empty souls and inequalities are equally as blatant.

So with inequality at an all-time high it's no surprise that trust in today's politicians is at an all-time low.

But what is baffling is that despite what the polls tell Cameron about how out of touch he appears to the average voter he and his Tory party still don't seem to 'get it'.

Anyone still harbouring doubts about whether we are, actually, 'all in it together' needed look no further than the recent Tory party fund raising frivolities at the Hurlingham Club.

David Cameron and Boris Johnson's £160,000 ultimate tennis match with Putin's former deputy finance minister, Lubov Chernukhin, in front of hedge fund tycoons, cabinet ministers, billionaires, lobbyists and property developers made Henry VIII's wrestling match with   Francis I on the Field of the Cloth of Gold, look like a vicarage tea party.

In which case, when our prime minister's busy flogging off tennis matches, grouse shoots, a £45,000 bottle of champagne and a £20,000 pot of honey, you might well ask no, not 'stands the church clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea?' (This is 21st century Westminster, not 20th century Granchester), but how much do you have to pay for Cameron to toss your salad?

Bankrolling the party's election campaign might be how the Tory party HQ would describe this farrago.

Behaving like a bunch of Bullingdon Del Boys is how the disabled and those struggling to hold down their jobs will judge it – a tacky pantomime of performing seals paying for access to our self-serving party political class.

Meanwhile, down here in the Dean we are waking up to the latest threat to our Forest – a grandiose, unsafe and environmentally unsound development in Cinderford's Northern Quarter.

'Don't be seduced by politicians honey words',' says Jonathan Porritt, champion of a sustainable Forest in public ownership, and a Forest not for swapping or for sale.

'For England's the one land, I know, where men with splendid hearts may go,' wrote Rupert Brooke in Granchester. Leigh Wood is right. Foresters need splendid hearts to keep our Forest and the Northern Quarter open to all and not sold to a few.

–John Muir, Newnham.