I WAS amused to read the letter from your correspondent suggesting that non-householders should pay their share towards local council costs. Not so many years ago Margaret Thatcher had such a system. It was called poll tax.
Thanks to vociferous opposition largely orchestrated by those who were paying for the first time the Act was repealed. Of course, the method was crude and needed refining. Perhaps local income tax would be fairer, but it was a step in the right direction.
As a young man living in London during the 1950s I struggled to maintain a wife and children and pay a mortgage on one salary. In the identical house next door there were four adult wage earners. In the house opposite there were five, all with their own cars, all making full use of the libraries, swimming baths and other benefits provided by the council. The rates demanded for each house were the same.
Now, as an elderly widower, I still struggle to pay the council tax from the savings which were intended to provide some small degree of comfort for my late wife and myself in our old age. I learned long ago that 'fairness' and 'justice' were abstract ideas which only existed in Utopia – certainly not in Tony Blair's 'New Britain.'– B.C. Baker, Allastone Road, Lydney.