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. 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 issue (and others such as planning fiats and the like) is a sense of our quiet desperation.

Whilst evidence of the parallel universe inhabited by our political class mounts daily (Westminster's £30,000 per annum fig trees make Coleford's £10,000 per annum councillors look a mere bagatelle)it's hardly surprising that however relieved we might feel at the thought of some slightly more regular behaviour in the Commons' Strangers Bar, our sense of justice should be so outraged.

Whether local or national and regardless of which party whips them into shape, this political elite has succeeded in insulating itself almost completely from the will of the people.

A Westminster conveyor belt of consensus driven career politicians, in thrall to an unelected and corrupt coterie of Brussels bureaucrats, has spawned a class of local politicians Lenin would have been proud of. And the hapless electorate has been left with a choice that even Hobson would have envied.

Successive governments, having shredded our democracy, 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, whether it's the 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 injustice and entitlement, when human life is no longer sacred, when voting changes nothing... civil disobedience stalks the highways.

Because as 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.'

– John Muir, Newnham.