THE history of the 19th and 20th century has been a constant struggle of ordinary people, through their democratically elected governments, to control big business.

Our parents and grandparents had to stop charlatans using monopolies and cartels to fix high prices for food and fuel as well as living space or sell us defective and dangerous goods. Now we see central government cutting services like the NHS along with local government and civil service inspectors.

Public services are undermined and we are left with no protection.

Tax inspectors have virtually vanished and governments are undermined by their inability to finance themselves. Here we have to blame Whitehall.

Call centre tax collecting and online self-assessment has failed us in every way. Our online state with online applications for everything is no state at all and is wide open to abuse and fraud.

Grenfell Tower is just one of the many dangers we as ordinary people are now exposed to. It demonstrated staggering levels, in London and the South East, of a black market in social housing sublet without authority or permission.

The rich are retreating behind walled compounds and vanishing from social media because they know the profound dangers to us all in cutting front-line police.

The EU was never the threat to national sovereignty, quite the reverse.

The undermining of the idea of the need for any government or any government inspectors was always and continues to be the threat to national sovereignty.

There aren’t even any journalists left to report on this all for us in the BBC or in our newspapers.

Nigel Boddy, Darlington