I READ the letter from E Sparks (HAS, May 16) with great interest.

He wrote that a small number of wealthy people pay almost half of the entire income tax take, but fails to add that over 99 per cent of the wealth in the UK is owned by just one per cent of the population.

These just might be the same people who are paying the most income tax. Funny that.

Of greater interest was his reference to George Orwell’s Animal Farm allegory.

Whenever I hear a Coalition politician spout the discredited lie “it’s all Labour’s fault” I think of Squealer and his “surely you don’t want Jones back?”line.

I hear Eric Pickles banging on monotonously about public sector versus private sector, and think of the sheep with their “four legs good, two legs bad” maxim.

David Cameron has to be Napoleon, the animals’ leader, ultra vain and always blaming his predecessor, Snowball (Gordon Brown) for anything that goes wrong.

And when I look at that Coalition frontbench of Tory and Lib Dem multi-millionaires I’m reminded of the last line in the book: “And the animals looked from pig to man and from man to pig and could not tell which was which.”

Charlie Kay, Bishop Auckland.