Cameron and Clegg seem in haste to dismantle all the services that make our society tick.

They tell us that all these functions can be provided by the private sector or by charities and volunteers.

Latest in the line of cuts are our areas of natural beauty, which are to be offered to private firms who will want to run them to make a profit.

Two generations ago these functions were almost all carried out by private firms and voluntary groups.

A very detailed study in the Oxford district in 1935-40, done by Barnett House, showed just how disastrous this arrangement could be.

Competition, which our government says is so healthy, had led to duplication of popular and lucrative services, and great gaps in service where no profits could be made. Volunteers by their nature pick and choose where to put their time and effort – leading to unpopular areas of need not being met.

We had a police-aided charity for clothing for poor children in Oxford (all clothing and boots carefully marked) but no way of getting clothing if you came from outside the city, and the Cutler Boulter dispensary for medicines for the poor, but no widespread scheme across the Oxford district.

The study was absolutely clear in its conclusion that it was the mark of a civilised society to have state organised and co-ordinated health, education and welfare, and that the patchwork of torn and inadequate services they had mapped in Oxfordshire were woefully inadequate to the needs of a modern industrialised city.

But we are heading towards that old outworn system again; this time without even the Poor Law and the workhouse to keep us from destitution.

We need to campaign any way we can – through our MPs, our councillors, or joining campaigns such as Keep our NHS Public, or Save our Services, or the Anti Academy Alliance, to put a stop to this destruction before it is too late.

Liz Peretz, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford