BARRY VAUGHAN, of Townsend Close, West Alvington, writes:

Surely a change of government requires a change in all government offices.

I have little doubt that this will be the sole letter commenting on your vital news item from the much-missed conscientious reporting by Steve Peacock concerning the coming rising of the South Hams council tax, Gazette, February 19.

The astute Gazette ran a ­similar warning article about council tax increases a year ago, February 27, 2015. Again, there seemed to be no stirring in the Kingsbridge cabbage patch.

This is a thoroughly bad Thatcher-inspired tax, scripted with a flawed, mismatched structure in substitution for time-tested ‘rates’, formulated to allow unlimited increases, enforced by dubious legislation, and thus increasing the amounts of disposable income able to be removed without palaver from lowly or needy citizens.

The last election saw the whole country ‘blue’. But ­council members are slyly feather-bedding such erring voters from the usual ­predictable Tory blunders of power – from cuts everywhere, austerity programmes, frenzied anti-worker/anti-unification driven by ‘long live the ­company’ ethics, underpinned by the privatisation of ­humanity, bulwarked by ­spiteful legislation.

It is not difficult to detect how councillors are doing this, yet how their interpretation of duty has become twisted into a ‘no-alternative’ maladministrational deception is depressing.

What is difficult to fathom, though, is the source of that gung-ho spirit leading them to assume that poorer persons within their wards and responsibilities can be abused to ‘make good’ withdrawn government grants to local councils, in spite of a veiled Niagara Falls ­cascade of national tax income. This is cloaking bad, fragmented ­government.

The ignored citizens are now being ­overloaded by extended responsibilities for financing their empire building of ­increasingly diverse demands more correctly matched to full government funding. The point is, taxes are being increased by all sorts of means all the time – VAT is 20 per cent, remember. Will they ever have enough?

If council finances face a funding gap owing to central government cuts, then that is it. Cut it will be. Voters must stomach that which they have voted in, and silently step back, while their fellow citizens drown, swimming in deep debt, finding life a constant austerity ordeal to keep even the most basic home together.

Leader of Devon County Council Mr Hart said in a ­comment about austerity: ‘Don’t expect any change after the general election, no matter who wins.’ Other leaders and councillors say similar comments. Pointless voting, isn’t it?

It is understandable why ­surveys go about saying that all the world’s very rich can fit in a double-decker bus. Move over folks, I need a space in the ­cabbage patch.