Sir, your editorial A profession no longer (BDJ 2007; 202: 235) is an undisguised anti-government diatribe and I can sympathise, but not altogether agree, with many of the points you make. The medical doctors brought government control upon themselves by failing to set their own targets for the health of the nation, by failing to regulate themselves and failing to instigate changes in structure and management of the NHS to make it fit for purpose in the twenty-first century. My word, how they hate change! The dental profession has, somewhat unfairly, been drawn into the backwash of all this, but in what ways is the new GDC council going to be irretrievably awful compared with that which we have now? You say that without elected dentists on the council 'In future our annual retention fee is just that, a sum of money to allow us the apparent privilege to carry out work in our field' and later 'Perhaps that should now be labelled as another of the stealth taxes – the Licence to Work Tax'.

But surely, that is exactly what the annual retention fee (ARF) is now. It is a flat rate that was imposed by the council in an autocratic authoritarian way. It discriminates against many dentists who are willing to work but not necessarily full-time, because it is proportionately greater the lower one's income. It discriminates against women with families who wish to work part-time, it discriminates against young postgraduates on grants, it discriminates against academics for most of their lives because they have low incomes, but worst of all it discriminates against me because I am over 65 and now work considerably less than full-time. The good work that the GDC did by instigating specialist lists is about to be undermined because it is now going to charge £50 per annum for each specialty, thereby putting a tax on self improvement for ever. In these days of electronic record keeping, by all means charge a fee for initial entry but thereafter the cost of maintaining a database is minuscule.

So – the ARF is nothing less than a poll tax, imposed by a council having elected dentists. The President himself (a dentist) has explained, with breathtaking sophistry and insouciance, that it is a fee charged for putting dentists' names on a register. Without your entry you cannot practise, there is no room for negotiation, there is no prospect of a sliding scale based on income from dental work. The dentists have had their day and look what we have.