Sir – Like thousands and thousands of people across Oxfordshire I have recently received Oxfordshire County Council’s Oxon News. In the August issue (Number 25, no less) we find council leader Keith Mitchell appearing — with a nice photo — on page three supporting the Coalition Government’s programme of cuts (‘we are all in this together’).

We find him again on page 23 with a joint article with the chief executive (‘what services do you want to keep?’) and then a large quotation (given twice) from him in the article on pages 26 to 27 in which he makes a highly contentious statement that many many economists would disagree with: ‘This is the medicine required to help England recover from the worst economic crisis since the Second World War’. The magazine’s first two purposes, then, seem to be to boost Mr Mitchell’s ego and to support Conservative (and now Lib Dem) propaganda. The third purpose is to give us the usual heartening tales of various people in local government doing their job, which would be fine if we did not live in the supposed cost-cutting era that was launched as soon as ‘Slasher’ George Osborne got into 11 Downing Street.

We are told that ‘every public sector is having to structure services accordingly and in some cases to modify or abandon existing plans’. The irony that the most obvious waste of money is Oxon News itself and that this is the first thing that should have been abandoned (they have had a few months to do it) seems to be lost on Mr Mitchell and his team. So let’s us all join ‘the Big Debate’ and suggest that this wretched magazine be scuppered before we all have to put it with other similar waste matter in our recycle bins again.

Ken Lovesy Headington Hill