WE READ that at a county council cuts meeting, Keith Mitchell asked Charles Shouler: “Would you agree that the public as a whole does not have the slightest idea of the scale of cuts we have to make over the next three or four years?” (Protests as county cuts youth service, Oxford Mail, April 20).

Quite who, or what, “the public” is and what it does, or does not, know, Mr Mitchell doesn’t say.

Mr Shouler is reported to have replied that the nation faced “a period of austerity”.

As the recently published deprivation survey and map of Oxford graphically demonstrated, one person’s austerity is another person’s poverty, and very few of us (myself included) can possibly grasp what life is like for those subsisting at the bottom of the socio-economic pile.

For the better-off, austerity might mean fewer holidays abroad each year. But for the worse-off, it could mean not being able to afford fresh fruit and vegetables or children’s shoes.

As for support for youth workers, this support is at the level of bread and water and not whisky and oysters. In other words, basic and vital social and cultural sustenance, rather than an extravagant luxury.

Mr Mitchell and Mr Shouler might like to reflect on what austerity means in practice. Or is reflection also unaffordable in these difficult times?

BRUCE ROSS-SMITH, Bowness Avenue, Headington, Oxford