DAPHNE Pearson, in her 'Parking is not free' letter of February 24, may or may not be justified in endorsing the council proceedings which lead to the cabinet's decision to introduce car parking charges. (Parking, like the NHS, is obviously 'free' only to those who don't pay taxes.) But with due respect to the good doctor, she's missing the point.

And the point, put simply, is that simmering beneath the surface of almost all the letters on this subject (and others like the planning fiats which are equally contentious) is a sense of quiet desperation.

Whilst evidence of the parallel universe inhabited by our political class mounts daily – Westminster's £30,000 per annum fig tree implant makes Coleford's £10,000 per annum councillors' 'expense' allowance look a mere bagatelle – it's hardly surprising that however relieved we might feel at the thought of some kind of regularity being re-introduced into MPs' behaviour in the Commons' Strangers Bar, our sense of justice is outraged.

Whether local or national and regardless of which party whips them, our political elite seems to have succeeded in insulating itself almost entirely from the will of the people.

A Westminster conveyor belt of career politicians, driven by consensus and in thrall to a corrupt coterie of Brussels bureaucrats, has spawned a class of local politician Lenin would be proud of.

Meanwhile the hapless electorate has been left with a choice that makes Hobson's look positively exotic.

Having shredded our democracy, successive governments now behave according to some kind of divine right... their 'divine' right to tax us to oblivion while spraying our money at the undeserving rich as much as the undeserving poor, and whether they're bankers and bureaucrats or the indolent and indulged.

When legalism stifles us and inertia depresses us, when we're burdened by a kleptocratic culture of entitlement, when human life has ceased being sacred, when voting changes nothing... civil disobedience stalks the land.

Marcus Tullius Cicero once observed 'the enemy is within the gates; it is with our own luxury, our own folly, our own criminality that we have to contend.'

We have been warned. Because, as Benjamin Franklin pointed out, 'People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither, and will lose both.'

– John Muir, Newnham.