Sir – Your correspondent, Tim Hughes (Weekend, July 11), reviewing Cornbury Festival, suggests that ‘You know that you’ve got things right as a festival organiser, when your regulars include the Prime Minister, Royalty and A-list celebs’.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Pop has indeed eaten itself, and the waste product is something large, corporate and evil-smelling.

A territory once occupied by the creative, dissident voices of young people has been colonised by parasitic big business, and the Old Etonian, bastions of The Establishment.

The fact that David Cameron can mingle with the Pimms-swigging crowds at Cornbury, that Boris Johnson-loving Mick Jagger can headline the annual Glastonburial ceremony, has nothing to do with these festivals being a hot ticket, or them being cool dudes — it is because the spirit of rock and roll has long since been patented, bottled, and flogged off to the highest bidder. Young people are denied access to these over-priced events; you won’t see them on the picnic rugs or in the pop-up yurts.

Their education maintenance grants have been scrapped. Their students loans have become life-long millstones. And they face mass unemployment. Punk rock once pretended to offer a cutting edge. Sadly, that cutting edge now bears a large slab of Country Life butter.

Only new forms of resistance will throw up new genres of music, and festival organisers will only know they’ve got things right when the Prime Minister shakes, A-list celebs are rattled and Royal heads roll again.

Chris Davis, Oxford