AS ALMOST always there are so many things to comment on in your paper of August 31 but I could not write without acknowledging the excellent informative, readable and thought provoking letter from David Borrett (‘Proposal thoughts’).

However, it is the letter from Luigi Gregori which stirs most thought (‘Results of cuts’). He comments on ‘the underlying message’ in a couple of articles you printed but it is interesting that what he sees as the underlying message and what I, and I suspect others, see as the underlying message are two different things. Because it suits his political position things are all the fault of continuing cuts in government spending but perhaps there is more to it than that. He quotes a lot of statistics (and we all know what they say about statistics!) which he uses to prove his point, but we could (and should) ask a few pertinent questions.

He talks of the rise in attacks on police officers and the surge in violent crime — why is this happening? Has the culture of the country changed? Have we become more violent? Do we have less respect for police officers?

What has caused this change? I could suggest some reasons, but I could probably hear the howls of anguish and opprobrium from him and his colleagues if I did.

Is Luigi Gregori happy that society is becoming more violent and just wants more police officers to keep a lid on the problem? That’s just putting a sticking plaster over the problem — we really need people to be less violent and debating that is a subject for a whole page of your paper.

On the point of continuing cuts in central government funding we might ask, “Where is all the money going?”

We have more people paying more tax, more houses paying more rates (okay – council tax but a rose by any other name), more businesses paying more corporation tax, fewer services provided free by local and national government, more service that used to be free (well ‘free’ in that we didn’t pay at the point of delivery – there was no ‘Free Tree’ with services falling like ripe apples!) but now not free and those services that are being provided being provided at a reduced level, massively reduced armed services, national assets being sold off at an alarming rate, etc, etc.

George Osborne, while he was still chancellor, arranged for HMRC to send us all a pretty pie chart of where our PAYE was being spent. Another exercise in duplicity of course since the underlying message I got was that he was trying to show us how little of our PAYE was being used to pay the EU in advance of the referendum. What would have been, and would now be, much more useful, is a pie chart showing us where all government revenue is being spent and comparative charts for every 10 years going back to 1950.

Perhaps then we would see where all the money is going.

Stanley Oram, Bulbery, Abbotts Ann.