Sir – Keith Mitchell’s comments that the cuts protesters are “an ugly, badly dressed student rabble”, reminds me of the comments of Marie Antoinette the aristocratic Queen of France who dismissed those who had just stormed the Bastille and started the French Revolution as merely the work of the ‘sale sans-culottes’ (dirty people without trousers).

Let’s hope that councillor Mitchell does not suffer the fate of Marie Antoinette and the other French aristocrats who arrogantly dismissed protesters and their families as rabble.

I just hope that when the students return and say they are in so much debt as a result of councillor Mitchell’s elitist government they can’t afford bread he does not lean out of the windows of County Hall and tell them to eat cake instead.

I fear if his arrogant detachment from the realities that face the average person persist there could be more trouble.

David Williams, Oxford City Council