While watching an episode of Robin Hood on BBC TV, the evil Sheriff of Nottingham was heard to say to a group of poor villagers: "If you do not pay your taxes, you will be punished accordingly."
They were all then marched off to the dungeons. Which left us viewers, knowing it was fiction but that it really did used to happen, thinking what a cruel time it must have been.
Yet that speech could just as well have been made by a modern day magistrate when sentencing old-age pensioners to prison for being unable to pay their council taxes. In this context, little has changed over 800 years.
Except Gordon Brown has replaced the Sheriff of Nottingham and we have no Robin Hood to come to our rescue - although we have plenty of robbing hoods.
DEREK HONEY, Queen Emma's Dyke, Witney
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