THE government provides services and a ‘safety net’ for all the citizens of this country.

OK, so it supplies national defences, medical services, social security and all the rest and there are various other government departments that act on our behalf.

We elect politicians to arrange for all this to happen, but once they’re in office we tend to leave them to get on with the job until something happens to wake us from our slumber.

I suspect that ‘something’ has now happened and that many of us are shocked at some of the ways in which our money is being spent, both locally and nationally.

To take things to a very basic level, imagine that all the tax revenues from a particular town, village or hamlet were to go into a single pot.

Let’s call the hamlet, for want of a better name, Burley Gate.

What if anyone in that community then needed the kind of support the various government bodies currently supply?

Naturally the attendance of the police, ambulance or fire services would always be available.

But other expenses? Rather than leaving everything to a faceless civil servant in a faraway office, what if other expenditure had to be approved by a local committee of some kind?

What if everyone in the village knew that someone on disability benefit was fully fit and holding down two or three jobs, or that their neighbour was putting in a claim that wasn’t justified. If it was left to the villagers to decide, would they allow money from “their pot” to be paid to them?

If someone arrived from a foreign country and demanded to be given immediate housing and other benefits, would they be granted or would they told to make their own arrangements?

If local people were told that a percentage of “their pot” had to be sent directly to China, India, South Africa or other well-off aid-receiving countries, or that they had to contribute towards the salaries of public officials being paid 10 times their own income, would they agree?

I believe that ‘the state’ has grown far too big, that far too much is being done “in our name” and that we have far too many politicians whose main interests appear to involve looking good and getting reelected.

No thought is being given to whether or not much of our national expenditure is either necessary or effective.

Meanwhile, as taxpayers, we’re funding all this.

Someone, somewhere, has to take hold of the huge amounts being spent by central and local government and should say “no”

to anything that was obviously not necessary.

MARTIN FIELD, Burley Gate, Herefordshire.