If Jim Campbell thinks North Oxford is a “ghetto for the mega-rich” (March 12), I suggest he comes and has a look around for himself.

My immediate neighbours consist of the widow of a retired army officer, five academic families with both partners working, an optician, and two JR doctors with working partners, a computer programmer and a retired solicitor.

My wife (a college administrator) and I (a lawyer) are both working part-time in our seventies. All we members of the “mega-rich” are careful to park our gleaming Rolls- Royces well away from home and not to tell anybody about our yachts and private jets.

Mr Campbell reminds us that the Liberal Democrats advocate “a Mansion Tax”. What constitutes “a mansion” in this context?

I recently completed the probate of a fairly junior civil servant who bought, for £8,750 under Thatcher’s Right-to-Buy scheme, the former council house in which he had been born. It was in a run-down area of bedsits then known as ‘Rachman County’ but now re-branded as ‘North Kensington’ – fashionable amongst newly-gilded bankers and politicians. The estate sold it for £1.85m to a city speculator.

My deceased client had an occupational pension of £17,000 odd and a state pension. If a four-bed semi of this value qualifies as ‘a mansion’ for tax purposes, how do its advocates suggest people like him would have paid it? How are North Oxford residents who bought their houses 30 years or more ago, before the prices went crazy, going to pay it?

“Mansion Tax” has all the hallmarks of an idea hit upon by a group of undergraduates at three in the morning, after their fourth bottle, before collapsing into a sound slumber — and should end there.

Charles Bidwell

Wolvercote

Oxford