YOU can pretty much detect the true nature of a government by looking carefully at what it tries to do in the first few weeks of gaining power.

The theory is that you get all the difficult and unpopular stuff out of the way in the early part of the administration, so that you can offer all the bribes and popular stuff as the election approaches.

I suppose that accepting a 10 per cent pay rise for MPs comes pretty close to the perfect unpopular policy.

For all the smoke screen of “accepting an independent pay panel recommendation” and “it’s cost neutral because other perks are being reduced”, there will be a lot of us who remember the “We are all in it together” plea from the Tories.

It’s particularly hard if you are a public sector worker who hasn’t had a pay rise in years and are being told it will only be one per cent in the future.

No surprise therefore that the new Tory government are setting about making it even harder for working people to withdraw their labour, as a last resort protest.

Conservatives only ever talk about strikes affecting people who, for example, are inconvenienced by transport strike action.

It never seems to occur to them that the people striking for a fairer deal are normally the same hard working people.

A government, elected by a little over 30 per cent of the population, thinks it perfectly okay to insist on much higher support for strike action to take place. I suspect that a lot of people being forced to strike will also be affected by reductions in tax credits, whilst the Tories have given tax breaks to the better off.

Anyone making the case for a bit more social justice and fairness in society is characterised as being a bit of a “leftie”.

Precisely, because the BBC is often perceived by Conservatives as a left leaning organisation, they have also launched an attack on our much cherished, internationally renowned, BBC.

If we are not careful, we will indeed end up with a much diminished broadcaster, both in scale and quality of output.

Despite the continuing threat from climate change, the early days of this government have seen announcements including that they won’t support renewable energy projects like wind farms, that it is perfectly okay to allow fracking under our national parks, tax reductions on fossil fuels and the answer to possible fines from Europe over our failure to clean up our air quality is “to leave Europe”.

The Tories even attempted to relax rules that would bring back fox hunting.

I had feared what would happen if the conservatives took power without the restraining influence of my party, the Liberal Democrats. We are beginning to see a pretty clear picture emerge.

CLLR DAVID HARRISON, New Forest Liberal Democrats