I have had a lovely Christmas.

Being the senior citizen in this particular family I look back and wonder as to what happened to those certainties in life, the health service, education for our children and grandchildren, social welfare programmes supporting the vulnerable, a well funded and resourced police service.

They all appear under threat because they have been starved of resources.

There is a Conservative idea that if you starve public services of resources for long enough then people start to seek alternative ways of managing ie voluntary services taking over providing transport links for villagers rather than helping they become the only option.

I think one of our local MPs put his name to this idea. I can only hope that the suffering that people have endured over these last two parliaments has been by accident rather than design.

As to the future. It feels bleak to me.

Our democracy allows us to return to the ballet box to put right decisions we may feel we made wrongly in the past.

This new local council structure appears to leave us less able to seek change through the ballet box on local issues.

Whether you are a Conservative, Labour or Liberal Democratic, controlled council this change makes the prospect of change difficult if not impossible.

The process of local democratic accountability has been dealt a huge blow. We have returned to the days of "rotten boroughs".

The other immediate matter of concern is so called Brexit.

Our democracy gives us all an opportunity to put right our mistakes through the ballet box.

A referendum with no recourse to return to that decision is in my view an affront to our democracy.

I am absolutely sure none of us would have foreseen the outcome or even the process that we have endured over these last two years.

I am also pretty sure, in the light of all our experience of the last few months, we have a right to return to that decision and to ask ourselves again is this what we want.

In any other part of our democracy there is accountability through the ballet box.

Why is this particular decision so special that we can't as with all particular political decisions we make be able to put them right by returning to the ballet box?

I understand we have the opportunity through the European court to cancel the whole process, there is also I understand an opportunity to pause the process as well. Neither option spends to much time in the public eye.

No one could possibly have any thing to fear from another vote. Could they ?

ANDREW WILCOX

Address supplied