‘LET them eat cake’ Marie Antoinette is alleged to have replied when she was informed that the peasants were without bread and were starving.

Conservative MP Nadine Dorries provided us with another immortal quote when she described David Cameron and George Osborne as ‘two arrogant posh boys who don’t know the price of a pint of milk’.

I can well believe that Marie Antoinette did genuinely think that the peasantry could fill up on cake if there was no bread available and, sadly, I fear that Nadine Dorries wasn’t far from accurate when she made her House of Commons statement about the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Making harsh decisions which will affect the wellbeing of people is easy when you neither know them nor understand the circumstances in which they live.

Many politicians have little grasp of what their austerity agenda is doing and will continue to do to the lives of the least well off and the most vulnerable.

David Cameron wrote recently to the leader of Oxfordshire Council to express his ‘disappointment’ that the council was proposing to make significant cuts to frontline services such as day centres for older people and asked why Oxfordshire was not making ‘back office savings’ and why hadn’t it sold off its surplus property.’

In his own backyard he hadn’t realised what impact the cuts to local government monies had had; 2,800 jobs had gone in Oxfordshire.

Strangely he also didn’t realise that it would be illegal for a council to use capital returns to meet current budget requirements.

David Cameron’s ignorance of the reality outside Westminster has led to policies created by the extreme right being nodded through in Cabinet.

However, politicians are not alone in their ignorance; too many of us are similarly guilty; I had no understood what ‘fuel poverty’ meant until I sat, many years ago in early January, with parents in their totally unheated house; the purpose of my visit was to help them with their budgeting!

I was so cold by the end of the visit that my teeth were literally chattering; my ‘help’ to them was to confirm that they managed amazingly their pitiful income and seek charitable help for them.

‘You never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them’ - Atticus Finch in To Kill A mocking Bird.