'Out of touch' was the heading the Review gave last week's letter from Peter Jones – a letter deploring the state of the Forest of Dean District Council's cabinet and the arbitrary decision of its five member Tory 'politburo' to force through a policy of charging for parking in the council's town car parks.

'Out to lunch' (and probably a three courser with free parking, and paid for by the taxpayer) might be another way of putting it. A report recently handed to Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles states local councils, 'could give every household in the country a £450 tax rebate if they stopped wasting £10billion a year'.

Or 'out of the ark'... if this 'infamous five' think that our shopkeepers, throttled by taxes and red tape, could conceivably be half-witted enough to imagine, as was apparently suggested at a full council meeting last October, that 'charging to park could stimulate trade'.

But 'out on their ear' they will be if they fail to recognise the people's will, made crystal clear in the 7,000 signature petition. Because unless they show signs of recognising the harshness of the economic climate for our small businesses ... unless they 'stop fiddling while the Forest's economy burns', these five councillors will face some civil disobedience.

Pace Peter Jones... I suspect it was that 18th century Christian philo­sopher of freedom, John Locke (and not Thomas Hobbes who believed in the absolute authority of the state) who 'made the case that society's governors could only rule with the consent of the governed.'

'In the teeth of gross injustice,' he wrote in his Two Treatises of Government, 'the ultimate right of every man is to resist their government by force and replace, it if they can, with a better one.'

– John Muir, Newnham.