THE problems with A-boards (Letters, 6 February) is far wider and deeper and symptomatic of a national malaise.

The country is in dire need of radical reform of so much from Parliament, the judiciary, local government, law and order and so much more and is long overdue; now probably beyond the point of no return – unless the public wake-up to what they can expect.

Yet responses to even most simple questions underline a generally held opinion that the 650-odd elected MPs in Westminster have done little over recent years to keep up with the real world.

It has become too cosy for all of them. So smug.

The real tragedy in the unfolding future for this once great Britain will be that the first casualty in any real radical reform is likely to be the loss of our monarchy.

The prospect of this country’s present membership of the EU becoming part of a European Federal Socialist Republic is very real.

What is so galling is that it is Sir George Young and Ian Carr’s generation of politicians, abetted by senior civil servants, who have not done anything (because of a policy that tends to be reactive and not proactive) other than to quote long-standing ‘constitutional principles’ and in so doing, democracy has become a fanciful fantasy.

Perhaps part of the responsibility is expressed in George Bernard Shaw’s lines from The Apple Cart: “What Englishmen will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?’

John Haw, Stone Close, Andover