OVER recent weeks, leaders of councils and quangos, like the Police and Crime Commissioner and hospital trustees, have been asking the public via your and other local newspapers for advice on how and what to cut from their services.

It is on public record that since 2010, local government has taken a 40 per cent budget cut. Border control, courts, the police, prisons, probation, social care, child protection, housing, libraries, environmental protection have suffered about the same, while taxes on the rich are cut.

Even the protected areas of health and education are suffering cuts as demand exceeds the baseline fixed budgets. Those appointed to manage these services , like Police Commissioners, know full well that further planned cuts cannot be made without deterioration of services to the point that legally and ethically set minimum standards, like A&E waiting times, will not be met.

If there is no money tree, funding of public services can come from four main sources: borrowing, which is how we got into the 2008 crisis and which is still rising at an alarming rate; printing money, which is essentially what this Government is doing via quantitative easing; the growing practice of charging users for public service which they have paid for already in taxation, and which those in need often cannot afford; or taxation.

We are told incessantly by the “new few” that taxation is theft from the rich, evidence of envy, a drag on entrepreneurship, but many of us know the truth.

The reality is as expressed by the famous American Jurist, Oliver Wendell Holmes, that “taxation is the price which we pay for civilization, for our social, civil and political institutions, for the security of life and property, and without which, we must resort to the law of force”.

The problems are not how to organize more cuts to services we need, or may need, but having the courage in the face of elite outrage, and having the will to act, and then decide how to pay, what to pay for, where to pay, how to make managers accountable, and, above all, who is paying?

Like many I speak to, who are willingly paying their taxes, I consider the scandal of our age to be that richest few and multinational corporations are escaping their duties to pay, using complicated and expensive avoidance and evasion measures.

Yet these few, who benefit from our services, are not only freeloading, they are treating the state as a private cash machine to draw down grants, agricultural payments, loans, loan guarantees, consultants fees, tax breaks etc. Extracting money from taxpayers that is needed for public services is increasingly the preserve of this “new few”.

It’s not Benefit Street that needs exposing, it is, as the ex-Conservative advisor Ferdinand Mount puts it well, the “new few”.

Dr John Gibbins, Sowerby, Thirsk