It has been interesting to watch the pressure mounting on Alistair Darling this weekend to back-down from the proposal to scrap the 10p tax band. It seems that Labour MPs are finally waking up to the fact that this vicious tax rise hits the poorest hardest. I am surprised that it has taken them so long to work this out though given that it was not Mr Darling who announced it - it was Gordon Brown in his last budget back in 2007. It has taken a year for Labour backbenchers to work out what the rest of us could see then (or perhaps they just see Darling as less scary than Brown was).

If Darling's interviews on TV this weekend are anything to go by, he has no intention of backing down and is plowing on regardless of the protests from his own MPs. Presumably he is being bullied into this by the Prime Minister. This will not be the first time that Gordon Brown and this Labour Government have shown themselves to be deaf to appeals for social justice.

A great example of this Government's determination to listen to absolutely no-one can be seen closer to home here in North Norfolk - coastal defences.

A large part of the North Norfolk coast has already been abandoned by the Government and whole villages are literally falling into the sea. Even worse is the fact that the Government has consistently hidden behind the Coastal Protection Act 1949 and refused to pay compensation to people whose homes have been lost.

And now the Government has gone one step further; allowing its own quango, Natural England, to propose that the the defences that defend 6,500 hectares of Norfolk (about 1% of the total landmass of the county) should no longer be maintained. This area includes at least six villages and a large part of the precious Norfolk Broads, not to mention a large amount of agricultural land. But again, there is no suggestion of any compensation to the thousands of people who will be affected.

Whilst this crazy proposal would not happen until twenty-five to fifty years time, the effects have been immediate and I have been inundated with calls from people whose house sales have fallen through or who have been advised that the value of their home has been reduced as a result of the uncertainty. In short, the whole area has been blighted until the Government rules the proposal out completely.

But the Government has been deaf to appeals for social justice on the issue of compensation. They simply allow peoples' lives to be ruined for the sake of a little investment in defences that have been funded for decades and in some cases centuries.

I oppose both the scrapping of the 10p tax band and the neglect of Norfolk's coastal defences and will fight to make the Government see sense. I suspect, however, that the only way of making this Government listen is to get rid of them at the next election and replace them with a Conservative Government that will deliver social justice and most importantly, will listen to us.