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Dissing respect
On the face of it, Dr Allison is embarking on a standard critique of the "politically correct". He wants to knock down institutionalised, empty and soulless politeness. He says there's too much respect knocking about, especially in the wrong places. Noting that black gangstas bang on about wanting lots of it, he goes on to say the whole enterprise has long been debased. He suggests that we stop respecting such undeserving objects as teachers, parents and politicians. Indeed - and here I think he is plain wrong - he says:

The fundamental ethical law is that those who want respect should receive contempt - just for wanting it.

But don't be fooled. Dr Allison doesn't think we should only respect people and institutions that have earned our obeisance or admiration. He thinks the monarchy deserves respect, and not least because that's what it's for, whether there’s any merit in the monarch or not. Rather similarly, he dislikes most government, but thinks you had better obey the state, because that's what it's there for. I think he's a bit of a Hobbesian. Who isn't?

Dissing humanism
From the off, this is a bumpy ride. But it gets bumpier. Dr Allison thinks that we misdefine and deify respect because we've got a rights agenda which flows from a humanist agenda. This is to say that we anchor our thinking in the rights of the person - any person, whether they be monster or fool.

This is very nearly a philosophical book. Dr Allison quotes and likes Hume and Mill and quotes but doesn't like Bernard Williams. Lincoln Allison is a happy Utilitarian and counterposes that doctrine with the humanism which he assumes always weighs the rights of the person too heavily against the happiness of the greater number.

This is useful stuff, but may not hold all that much water. I cheerfully define myself as a humanist, and do so on the basis that my cast of mind was mostly established by being taught, and accepting, that Erasmus and Sir Thomas More were terrifically important. They were humanist as opposed to obscurantist. I find it very hard to abandon an underlying affection for their way of thinking, even though it was much more religious (never mind better educated and cleverer) than any of mine.

Actually, Dr Allison's utilitarianism is a version of humanism. After all, utilitarianism is just one way of balancing the all-important rights of persons.

I'm not sure whether Dr Allison's ambitions are philosophical. They may be, since he accuses two other conservatives (one of them, Christie Davies, a Social Affairs Unit regular) of not being philosophical enough. Actually, I doubt this is a very philosophical book. It leaves too many stones unturned, too many paths unexplored. Its author may hope to achieve all kinds of things with The Disrespect Agenda, but to my eyes at least, its main value is that it lays out the archipelago of contradictions which is modern - perhaps any - conservatism. Using it, you can work out where you are and (to over-do the mapping idea) decide how to get to where you might like to be. We meet lots of writers and ideas, often in anecdotes and all briskly, and get a better grip on our own inclinations as we go.

Modern morals and manners
This is an important book for the Social Affairs Unit because it will help friend and foe understand the kind of argument this think tank is engaged in. The undogmatic Social Affairs Unit is trying to help people think through "morals and manners for the twenty-first century" and does so from what many would say is a broadly conservative point of view. Oh dear. You may say: how very New Labour. Doesn't the Social Affairs Unit's mission translate as "Traditional morals and manners in a modern context"? So be it. At least the Social Affairs Unit isn't frightened of the nation's back-story.

And whatever else we are, it isn't socialist. But as Dr Allison says, it is no longer enough for conservatives merely to define themselves as fighting socialism. We have won that one (at least unless there's a colossal recession). We know that we are for the idea that a good society depends on the voluntary activity of individuals and their myriad associations. We want more of that stuff, dangers and all. After that, we are fractured.

My own line is to stress that the conservative is always conflicted as between his authoritarian and his libertarian inclinations. (And between tradition and progress; and the rich and the poor.) Most of the time Dr Allison seems cheerfully keen on the freedom bit of that equation. Indeed, he really plants his flag firmly on a hill marked "libertine". He has spotted that the English are in some special and rather good way uncivilised.

I agree with that but only when I'm in the mood to remember that conservatives have to wrestle with the real vitality of the country they say they love. I didn't agree whilst I read Dr Allison's passages on a train and a nearby nihilist hooded oik played music on his mobile in loudspeaker mode. The oik was probably on his way home to a nice semi in Horsham, and that's what really ticks me off. What is it with this widespread emulation of the gormless? Oh, I know. It's a deep resentful kick against compulsory but unenforceable un-meant niceness. Which is Dr Allison's point.

Disinhibited and disrespectful
For my money, Dr Allison is weak, or rather, unthoughtful, on the thorny matter of how order and freedom are in a perpetual tussle to create liberty. The British are famous for their reserve and stoicism: that's how we got the Civil Service, the Stones, Shakespeare and the SAS. I like Jane Shilling's remarks in The Times on how Britain is now "disinhibited".

She might have said that we are now super-disinhibited. We always were a curious mixture of reserve and expressiveness. Perhaps Dr Allison would argue that we should shed more inhibitions. For my part I wish he had said more about the way misrule, in its better forms, is temporary and quite limited and that we have rather lost that sense of contractual naughtiness. It is hard to dispute that we are less well-mannered than we once were. The issue becomes how to balance the need for control versus chaos. And that often becomes a balance between institutions and individualism.

Sorry - but we should respect politicians
And here's my real beef with the book. Dr Allison says we should never respect politicians. I simply don't understand this. Rather as in the case of the monarchy (or the state), we should go out of our way to show that we respect the political process even whilst we see the flaws in its day to day reality.

Come to that, Dr Allison is less funny (or less insightful) than he thinks in his writing on parents and teachers. He certainly, for instance, doesn't help me work out what a person owes his not-especially loveable elderly mother. If not love, then what? Duty? Respect? Charity? Dr Allison says we should be nice to our parents because it makes for a nicer world. Wouldn't it be utilitarian to suitably compensate the world for one's failure to one's own? So why does it seem obvious to me that one “owes” something to one’s parents which hasn’t necessarily been earned and which can’t be discharged by any amount of generosity to anyone else? It seems feeble not to recognise that filial duty (or whatever) is a very big deal.

Respecting the past? Or moving on?
Moving on, Dr Allison lets us poke about in other matters which divide conservatives. One is the degree to which we are nostalgic, and as such rather keen on old-fashioned social mores. One of his heroes is Samuel Smiles, whom he rightly identifies as a liberator. As anyone who reads Smiles' Self Help will have to admit, his was a celebration of social mobility and the inherent human quality of enterprise to be found anywhere in society. Dr Allison suggests that Smile'’ view is that respectability

has an enormous propensity to decay into a kind of pseudo-respectability, in which materialism and hypocrisy are major components. And, even more fundamentally, it establishes structures in which petty tyrannies and repressions flourish.

It is often assumed that conservatives are necessarily middle or upper class. This made some sense when the lower classes divided themselves into the untroubling sort who respected those above them (and sometimes succeeded in joining them), and the troublesome sort who argued and struggled for the abolition of the upper classes (and sometimes succeeded in joining them). Dr Allison notes that the working class were at least as respectable (even the non-conservative amongst them) as the middle classes, and sometimes even more prone to outbreaks of unruliness. The point is that Dr Allison finds as much merit in the working class as in the middle class and that usefully reveals a further conservative complication.

Unpopular conservatives
In reminding us of the sheer variety of conservatisms, Dr Allison helps remind us how silly it is that modern conservatism is widely perceived to be a minority sport. It seems to be the preserve of admirable if prickly types - anally-retentive purists and prigs, at their worst - who have endangered the Conservative political party and allowed New Labour's mush to seem almost attractive.

Actually, of course, conservatism is more or less what almost all adults live by. It is more or less capable of coherent expression. But conservatism is complicated because it is most of society. It is where one is when one isn’t a revolutionary or a radical. It is conflicted and contested because it is the widespread habit of building a rule-based society. It needs to chafe as little as possible and to be capable of change.

The politics of the country doesn't stack up that way. The Tories still have the problem of “entitlement” and Labour can still play the underdog. As Dr Allison might put it, the Tories are thought pompous and to demand respect. In his book, they are bound to be deserving of contempt. Labour plays to that by insisting on everyone's right to sneer at the Tories. So the old stereotypes persist. Tories crave respect and look undeserving; Labour offers resentment and is forgiven its chippiness.

Conclusion
If it were just another diatribe against political correctness, this book wouldn't be new or much use. It isn't especially constructive, in the sense of giving us a recipe for the good society. But it is of value because it forces us conservatives to reconsider the necessary dark heart of our dislike of the politically-correct. We who are inclined to lament the "retreat of respectability" have to remember that politeness won’t build the world we want.

Lincoln Allison's book is a delightfully un-neurotic, unfussed account of many of the contradictions which ought more to entertain than daunt the conservative.

Richard D. North is the author of Rich is Beautiful: A Very Personal Defence of Mass Affluence and Scrap the BBC!: Ten Years to Set Broadcasters Free.

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The early novels centred on Robert Amiss, at first a civil servant, then an ex-ditto, his friends Inspector Jim Milton with wife Ann, a management consultant, and Old Etonian detective story addict Sergeant Ellis Pooley.

There was also Robert's girlfriend, the FCO high-flyer Rachel Simon and after the third novel, a cat called Plutarch with lots of personality. What do we have in the latest novel? All these people have been shunted to the sidelines with Ann Milton disappearing completely, an event that I might have to investigate by delving into the novels in-between.

Jim Milton is now a Commander and Ellis Pooley an Inspector, getting married to the gorgeous, highly intelligent and very right-wing Mary-Lou who is black and from a Baptist family from the American South. She seems to be a budding media personality. Rachel Simon has lost her job and is relying on Robert's future career as a detective story writer. The two young couples get married at the beginning of the novel and much hilarity ensues from the mismatches of the various families.

At the centre of the novel is "Jack" Troutback and she is a Character with a capital "C". One of my failures in the classic detective fiction department is that I dislike Characters with a capital "C". I have no difficulty in smiling at eccentricity, whether it is Sherlock Holmes's anti-social activity or Hercule Poirot's pernicketiness. But I have never taken to Sir Henry Merrivale (HM) or Dr Gideon Fell, indistinguishable from each other, in my opinion, as are the two authors, John Dickson Carr and Carter Dickson, being really the same person.

Baroness Troutback is rude, self-obsessed with lots of idiosyncrasies like smoking cigars or pipes and singing big-band songs very badly as well as voraciously bi-sexual and unable to give a coherent account of anything, being rather anxious to make elliptical statement. Thankfully, the social revolution since the days of HM has allowed lowly followers to tell the Character to get a move on as they haven't got all day. Her take on being anti-PC is to be unpleasantly offensive to anyone who comes her way. "Jack" Troutback is clearly not based on any real member of the House of Lords. Those ladies are formidable but never rude, especially not to waiters who cannot answer back.

The plot revolves round an incredibly PC college in New Paddington, Indiana, called Freeman University, where a totalitarian regime has been imposed under the guise of diversity by the criminal President, the tyrannical Provost and her thug of a henchman. Through a number of interesting developments, Baroness Troutback, the head of a college in Cambridge, is invited to be a Distinguished Visiting Professor (DVP).

Understandably, she does not like what she finds. She does not like the food, the people, the habits, the fact that it is no longer the forties or fifties in middle America, the diversity police, the control freakery or the destruction of anything resembling academic standards. Lady Troutback seems sublimely unaware how much of what she dislikes exists in England, which, in a head of a Cambridge college and active member of the House of Lords is surprising, to put it mildly.

Still her rudeness becomes an asset when she tackles the poisonous PC and diversity brigade. She senses that there is some criminal activity in the background and hires a couple of young private eyes who die in a mysterious car accident. There is also the unexplained death of the previous Dean who maintained high academic standards, so we know who is responsible for his demise.

There is also the mysterious and completely ineffectual guerrilla organization that wants to fight back but does not know how and clearly needs a Boudicca, to wit, "Jack" Troutback. The organization goes under the initials VRC, which stands for Vast Rightwing Conspiracy and takes much inspiration from Ayn Rand and the science fiction, I mean fantasy, writer Terry Goodkind.

So the lady decides to fetch Robert Amiss, who, at least knows what goes on in Britain, though his knowledge of America, libertarian writers and philosophy is so poor that several chapters are happily spent on him being enlightened in the rather odd certainty that the reader is on his level of ignorance.

Among other things Amiss, who was a bright and witty young man in the early books (he is still witty but has turned into a nitwit), does not know is the role the blogosphere has played in America. Apparently, Freeman U is so isolated that they know nothing about right-wing websites, writers or bloggers.

This novel came out last year when the blogosphere led the campaign against the bipartisan immigration amnesty and defeated it. Nobody in this novel knows anything about such matters and blogs are seen as itsy-bitsy little online diaries. Now that is so last century.

While "Jack" is doing the fetching somebody murders the tyrannical Dean and her thuggish sidekick. Needless to say, the police are moronic.

Once Robert has understood what the situation is he starts organizing a revolution, something the poor benighted Yanks cannot manage for themselves. It seems that they need a former junior British civil servant to explain to them how to set up anonymous e-mail addresses.

For all of that, the revolution is quite fun and the reclaiming of Freeman U to academic rigour and American pride is very satisfying. Ruth Dudley Edwards is a superb writer. There can be no question about that.

In the meantime "Jack" Troutback solves the murders by intuition. To be fair, who was responsible for the first three is clear from the very beginning. It is the murderer of the Dean and the thuggish sidekick that is solved by alchemy on the last page of the penultimate chapter.

Did I really dislike this novel? No, actually, it is an excellent read, witty, well-written, clever characterizations and excellent dialogue. But it is not a detective story. It is not even a particularly accurate description of American academia though some of the hits are palpable, indeed.

Maybe Ruth Dudley Edwards will now return her characters to England, reinstate Robert Amiss and his cohorts to the centre of the next novel and sideline the insufferable Baroness Troutback, bringing her out whenever an attack dog is needed on some pompous diversity guru.

Dr Helen Szamuely is a writer and political researcher as well as editor of the Conservative History Journal and co-editor of www.eureferendum.com.

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Ranging to include Captain Cook indicates the extent and variety of travel writing, as well as a context within which Grand Tour literature was located: the exposition of the outer world and discussion of the relationship with it of travellers, representative noble Britons. This was a classification that included factual as well as imaginative responses, and indeed one that located the writing about tourism alongside the depiction of it in other forms, most obviously paintings.

Another element of range is provided by the purpose of writing. In particular, there was a contrast between writing for the anonymous market of strangers, who purchased copies (or viewed paintings), and writing for oneself or for select relatives and friends.

The former, the views expressed in travel literature, are more accessible, through being printed, and the texts themselves are easier and more attractive to read than subsequently published accounts that were never intended for publication. In addition, much of the work on tourism has been done by amateurs lacking the time or resources to search for manuscript sources, and by scholars of literature whose forte has generally lain elsewhere. Both groups have concentrated on readily-accessible published material by prominent figures, without appreciating that such accounts should be regarded not as necessarily typical of the writings and views of tourists, but as works of literature.

Travel literature can be seen to be removed from the experiences of ordinary tourists, not least because, in some cases, it is probable that it was written to be read, as much as a form of fiction, as interesting works at times similar to picaresque novels, rather than as objective descriptions of the travels of individual tourists. Travel literature indeed provided an opportunity for autobiography and literary amateurism, often in the readable context of a heroic or mock-heroic journey. Such literature, however, was not uniform and, in the later eighteenth century, there was a move from the supposedly objective to the frankly subjective, in, for example, the writings of William Beckford.

At the same time, there was a degree of continuity because new works were in many senses explicitly or, more commonly, implicitly commenting on what had come before. Thus, in her Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany (1789), Hester Piozzi, who visited Italy in 1784-6, cited Addison, Brydone, Burney, Chesterfield, Cook and Orrery, Hamilton, Howell and Moore.

If borrowing was common, it also was in other aspects of the culture of print, such as cartography. The well-travelled John, 3rd Earl of Bute, who visited Italy in 1768-71, noted that travel writers drew heavily on other works, and was unhappy with what he found in their books. He thought many of the subjects useless or improper, which he blamed on the fact that "writing is become a trade".

As a trade, the frequency of publications suggested that there was a considerable market for such works. This can be atomised, not least between the often very factual nature of guidebooks and the more fluent accounts of travellers. In the former, the narrator was in the background, while, in the latter, he was to the fore, most obviously with Tobias Smollett's Travels through France and Italy (1766). There was clearly a market for both, but the latter enjoyed more attention in the culture of print in Britain.

Authorial intention was not the sole issue. The conventions expected by the market, reviewers and readers, as well as of writers themselves in this context, had to be respected in published work. This can be seen in the correspondence of James Russel, whose Letters from a Young Painter Abroad to his Friends in England (1748-50) were, in part, influenced by the demands of his family, specifically his father and his bookseller brother. Demands upon James, who was in Italy from 1740 until his death, included for a description of a trip to Herculaneum, as well as

some short account of Loreto, Bologna, Ancona and Venice: and some relations of diverting events,

I am truly sensible of the favour you have done me in touching them up, in such a manner, as has made them so acceptable to the public.

writing letters, in order to supply matter for a second volume.

Studying the writing of the Grand Tour has, thus, to confront the limitations of the sources. There is also the question of the agenda-setting by previous commentators, the effect of which was noted in 1763 by Margaret, Lady Spencer:

The chief things thought worth seeing at Turin were, the King’s Palace, the great Theatre, a hunting house of the King’s, and the Church of the Superga from whence there is a glorious view…

This pictorial quality was capable of different moods: there was a contrast between the emphasis on precise accuracy and that on the emotions conjured up by the scene, in short between the narrator as photographer and the narrator as painter. In the former, the writer was in the background and in the latter in the foreground. Each style had an appeal, although the former is less apparent to our post-Romantic sensibility. We are more engaged with the individual response, which make the accounts that sought that approach more interesting than those concerned to provide a uniformly-pertinent response.

Both aspects can also be seen in the social, political, cultural and other reflections of tourists. To take the last, the former are apt to provide a listing of prominent paintings and sculptures, while the latter focus on the individual response. The varied nature of the literature thus serve the different purposes of response.

Jeremy Black is Professor of History, University of Exeter. He is the author - amongst much else - of The Slave Trade, A Short History of Britain, The Holocaust, and The Curse of History.

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Hedging his bets
Prof Flew seems strategically cautious. It is his co-author, not him, who insists that the existence of God is logically necessary. Nor does Antony Flew discuss his beliefs as to how involved God is in his creation. But he does give a terrific hostage to fortune. He doesn't himself sketch out the reasons for believing in a personal God or in the Christian faith. However, he strongly endorses (and reprints here) the views of the Anglican bishop of Durham, N T "Tom" Wright, who thinks that the biblical Jesus is the historical Jesus. The bishop's arguments, not being Flew's directly, are of secondary importance to the book. (They seem strikingly feeble anyway and it does not do Flew much credit that he thinks they get anywhere.)

The upshot is that Professor Flew is arguing a fairly weak version of theism. He thinks it's reasonable to believe in a God who can do anything. He thinks lots of unbelievers are unreasonable. This is not very dogmatic or comprehensive stuff.

What I believe (not much)
One has to put one's own cards on the table. I am a whimpering agnostic whose lack of belief has never been tested by terror. Given the mysteries of the universe, I can easily imagine a (very weak Flew position) that there was a Source and one might as well call it God. But I am as impressed as the early Flew was by the problem that wondering about the beginning of the Source is no easier than wondering what the beginning of the universe might have been if it wasn’t the Source. Either on the issue of the godly Source, or on the more specific issue of what God is like and what "he" does, I am fond of the idea of faith, but I don't have it.

If I did suddenly get faith, I imagine it would be of the Christian variety, not least because of the sort of argument put by Don Cupitt (who was Dean at Emmanuel College, Cambridge during my brief and inglorious philosophy studies there in the early 1970s). Cupitt made a rather post-modern argument: Christianity may or may not be true, but it is a most satisfactory and sophisticated telling of a necessary story. When you're trying to colour in the ineffable, Christianity does well. Antony Flew seems to agree: he says that Christianity is "the one to beat" when it comes to religions.

By reason alone
It is crucial to faith that reason is subordinate to it. Anyway, this isn't a problem for Professor Flew, who insists:

My discovery of the Divine has been a pilgrimage of reason and not of faith.

Professor Flew now argues that Big Bang theory requires one to posit something which was where and when it all started, and even to kick it off. Flew then argues that the evidence for the sheer rationality of the universe's evolution of life - especially the codes within DNA - is so strong that one has to assume that a rational being has been at work.

I am more inclined to think that modern science merely updates previous arguments for the existence and rationality of God. It doesn't very much reinforce them.

But anyway, new science tends to pose new problems for the argument. For instance, if God was so darned clever in laying out a coded narrative, why did he bother to have a story with a beginning and a very, very long series of middle acts in which species came and went and laid down fossils, and then proceeded to the bits of the story we know about from human experience? Who was all the coded stuff intended to interest considering it was lived out whilst there wasn't anyone about with a brain big enough to discover it? Was God a tease? This is really just a modernised version of the issues Edmund Gosse's very touching father Philip wrestled with as he tried to merge Darwinism with his Plymouth Brethren faith, and the attempt doesn't get any more convincing as time goes on.

It is good fun, by the way, to note that Antony Flew quotes all sorts of heavyweight physicists who believed in God, Einstein and Heisenberg included. He cheerfully prays them in aid of his case though many of them were believers when Flew wasn't one, and most of the science which made them theists well pre-dated the sort of science which Flew argues has necessitated his change of mind to their way of thinking.

Conclusion
I doubt that anyone who has grappled with the nature of religious belief will be changing their mind as a result of this book. But that's not to say it isn't valuable. For a start, it is a very readable memoir from a man who was at the heart of the philosophical debates of the mid twentieth-century. It is a lively account of why Flew early on rumbled the excesses of the logical positivist school which tried to outlaw all discussion about things which weren't knowable. So it becomes one of the most easy-going guides to some very difficult ideas. Bits of it have some Americanised and even flip language, but they may well come from Antony Flew's co-author.

One of the comforting features of the book is that it reminds one that clever people and some of their most challenging thinking doesn't really add up to a row of beans. It is hard not to assume that this old theist is doing lots of wishful thinking, just as he did when he was an atheist.

Richard D. North is the author of Rich is Beautiful: A Very Personal Defence of Mass Affluence and Scrap the BBC!: Ten Years to Set Broadcasters Free.

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The question the taxpayer has to ask is whether because a service is publicly funded it should be micro-managed in the interests of control, even where this results in additional cost, and whether the independence of our legal system is worth preserving. Turning what is a public serving provided by private firms into a nationalised service has been shown to be expensive, and it is surely dubious whether those prosecuted by the State should have the State to defend them.

On 14th January 2008 new contracts for criminal legal aid work came into force. All solicitors' firms doing such work had to indicate by 31st October 2007 that they would be prepared to sign the contracts, and had to give this indication before the contract had been sent to them, In July new contracts of 18 months' duration only are to be issued and then the system is to be plunged into competitive tendering. The LSC prefer to call this Best Value Tendering, presumably on the basis that this sounds softer, but the process is to be competitive and is intended to drive prices down.

14% of solicitors' firms who were doing criminal work are said to have decided not to bother continuing. Some new firms have signed up, but these are likely to be sole practitioners or very small firms fragmenting from those who have given up altogether, operating on shoestrings from home or with very short leases and intending to give up when competitive tendering is introduced.

On 29th November 2007 the Commission issued a press release. It was an interesting piece of spin. The Commission described a Court of Appeal judgment as a welcome "clarification" and said:

This now enables us to move forward with greater certainty.

The contract for civil work contained clauses which allowed the Commission to amend it almost at will. While it is inevitable that during the life of a long contract there will have to be some amendments in response to changing circumstances, the Commission had given itself a very wide power to amend it indeed, to the point where they would be able to re-write the contract. The Court of Appeal described the contracts as "an extreme case", and the Commission will now have to pay not only the costs of the entire case, including the costs of the Law Society, but also damages. It will be interesting to know what the ultimate cost of all this will be to the taxpayer.

You might have thought that having lost so decidedly in court the Commission would have taken the opportunity to reflect and to consider how the judgment impacts upon clauses at present in the criminal contracts issued in January. There was no sign of any humility in their press release, which contained the usual buzz phrases about a "sustainable" legal aid system and "progressing" with reforms.

Even after the court judgment the criminal contracts still contained a clause which said that the Commission may "at our discretion" add to the specification of what is required under the contract "at any time". There were provisions for consultation to take no longer than 6 weeks, or even as little as 21 days, but the amendments could be with individual contractors as well as generally. Put bluntly they wished to amend the contract whenever they felt like it and with whomsoever they pleased. They also wished to terminate the contracts at short notice, but said they would do so:

only when we consider it necessary or desirable to do so in order to facilitate a reform of the Legal Aid Scheme.

It is impossible to run a business with this uncertainty. Firms with long office leases will be seeking to escape from them. Staff will not be offered any sort of job security. No sensible person is going to want to enter criminal legal aid work. The Commission talks about firms needing to "restructure", by which they mean sacking the experienced and qualified staff and employing low paid people to do the bulk of the work. A person with a problem is unlikely to see a solicitor at the start of his case.

In 1994 Mike McConville, Lee Bridges and others published Standing Accused. It was widely read, particularly by the Legal Aid Board which was said to have funded the research. The book describes the behaviour of what I would call the bucket firms - firms which employ a large number of unqualified staff, in which files are passed around like unwanted parcels and there is little care of cases. The abuses it described were very familiar to those associated with large firms, yet the book's illogical conclusion was that large firms were to be preferred. This theme has been taken up enthusiastically by the Legal Services Commission, although as the House of Commons Constitutional Affairs Committee noted in a very thorough and thoughtful report published in May 2007, there is no evidence to support the contention that quality is provided by the large firms.

In any event, although the Commission may want to deal with large firms, the reality is that they are not there. Lord Carter noted in his report published in 2006 that 33% of criminal legal aid firms in 2004-5 had an income of less than £100,000: it can be presumed that these were either sole practitioners or very small firms indeed.

Criminal work and established large firms do not mix. In a traditional firm the partners are concerned with fee targets. The criminal work is rightly seen as low paid and the partners will not want the Commission's auditors crawling all over their office, ticking boxes and rifling through files and telling them how they should run their business. The sole practitioner will typically be someone who began his career in a traditional firm, left when that firm decided to give up crime and set up on his own, being prepared to exchange a low income for the satisfaction of running his own ship. (I am using the word "his" to describe the solicitor, but of course it could also be "her". Women who have found it difficult to achieve partnership in a male dominated firm have made a success of running their own small business.)

The situation is different in London and in some major cities like Liverpool, but in the small or medium sized town you are unlikely to find a large criminal firm. The patchwork of small firms has served the system well, and there is considerable anger at the prospect of being subjected to a competitive tendering process which will undermine the good relations that firms that have with each other. Those who maintain that large means quality usually have no knowledge of the informal working relationships between small firms. We all have each other's home numbers and can easily get help with any police station or court emergency.

I would not expect my doctor or dentist to have to submit to competitive tendering. I know that my doctor is not a businessman but first and foremost a professional, and I want him to concentrate on my health. Similarly, I would not want my dentist - always supposing that I could find someone who still did NHS work - to be looking over his shoulder at auditors rather than concentrating on my teeth. I would also know that once a doctor has been refused a contract he is not going to be there the next time there is a round of competitive tendering - and it is proposed that competitive tendering for legal aid contracts should be every three years.

But sadly, the general public has little regard for solicitors. It is not until a member of their family is in trouble with the police that anyone realizes that solicitors do provide a service. People may be shocked by the treatment of lawyers in Zimbabwe or Pakistan, but their concern rarely extends to interest in our own legal system. Personally, I am considering setting up in business on Brighton Pier, or some other suitable place, and telling fortunes. It would be less stressful and possibly more secure.

Jan Davies has been practising as a solicitor in the criminal courts for over 20 years. She was a founder member of Reading Solicitors Chambers and between 2001 and March 2007 was a senior crown prosecutor in Oxfordshire. She now practises as an advocate in both magistrates and crown courts as an associate member of Reading Solicitors Chambers. She is the author of The Criminal Advocate's Survival Guide (Carbolic Smokeball Company, 2007).

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The baby boomers wanted to invent a new world. They could not bear their own back-story. In particular, they loathed Westminster and Whitehall. The very idea of representative democracy, with its subtle and covert elitism, was abhorrent to the baby boomers. Instead, they enjoyed and celebrated the shift of power to the media and campaigners. This wasn't People Power, but they sold it as that. It was, rather, the power of the baby boomer establishment.

They were out of step with their country. Most British people are tolerant and pragmatic, but not nearly as liberal as the new media and political elites think they are or ought to be. The left has had to adjust to a new mass understanding
that capitalism improves living standards. Even the Imagine and Blowin’ In the Wind generation has stealthily changed: the Aldermaston marchers and Grosvenor Square warriors are now Saga tourists (and their children and grandchildren are on an Asian gap year).

The Imagineering generation comes of age
In place of the old politics of division, the 1990s saw the creation of a new politics of the imagination. It was as though the old, very temporary, glamour and magic of John F Kennedy had been revived by the generation which most fell for it. Bill Clinton's triumph was to be thought the first black President, a victim for the therapy age. The trend lives on. Barack Obama, like JFK, wraps himself in unspecified "change" and has managed to seem to be a movement rather than a campaign. Tony Blair pulled off an even smarter actorly stroke. Even more than Kennedy, he inhabited the change that was required. He was the muse of a Britain rebranded in the baby boomer image.

The '68 Revolution hits Downing Street
From start to finish, Tony Blair never understood government. He only knew how to make it work less well. From start to finish, hardly anyone noticed. The result was that he achieved very little. He couldn't even see that Whitehall was ready to delineate and deliver the next stage of the Thatcherite reforms he wanted and she hadn't risked. He got one big result: having sidelined representative democracy, he could embark on an unpopular war. (Leave aside my view that this was his one noble act.)

The issue now is whether a post-baby boomer generation will reinvent good government. I think they may. Modern young people - those under 30 or even 40 - are aware that they have been failed. They have not had the luxury of growing up alongside - even against - real adults who understand social responsibility and structures, and their political equivalents. Sensing this deficit, they are probably up for some quite big shifts. They are the post-dissident generation.

The essence of the present failures of government are easily grasped. For ten years, the New Labour project was successful in undermining Westminster and Whitehall. Tony Blair had reason to fear parliament, home as it was of Labour MPs who hated his reforms. Whitehall horrified Blair, perhaps because it talked about detail. Whitehall knew that things didn't happen merely because they could be imagined and had been announced. Sweat, brains and constancy were required.

The enduring facts of government
Government has struggled with delegation and it always will. From Robert Peel to Harold Wilson and beyond, ministers have wrestled with an intolerable work-load. The answer has been to build a strong, responsive, impartial and apolitical Civil Service in Whitehall. It is corralled into departments, each headed by a member of parliament appointed as a minister with collective responsibility in Cabinet. The Prime Minister is primus inter pares, both supported and challenged by his ministerial colleagues, each with a three-way charge. They are in the PM's Cabinet; they are parliamentarians; and they hold an appointment from the Crown. It's not simple or pretty, but it can and has to be made to work.

Anyway, we have had the remarkable spectacle of four successive Cabinet Secretaries - the most senior men in the Civil Service - queuing up to denounce Blair's "coup" - the silent but deadly trashing of that system. One may wonder why they didn't speak out at the time, when it would have helped much more.
Tony Blair gave us government which could produce a blizzard of eye-catching initiatives before breakfast, but couldn't deliver them in a decade. Our sprightly leader produced a style of government which was casual but closed. He made a Kremlin out of Camelot. Even now, only Sue Cameron's pieces in the Financial Times give us much insight into Gordon Brown's paranoid continuation of Tony Blair's folly.

Restoring things requires us to understand representative democracy, as understood by Edmund Burke and nearly everyone else. This is to say that our version of democracy allows the mass of people to choose an elite - part professional, part patrician - to run its affairs. Subtle but robust institutions ensure that the many tensions within the mass are represented as decisions get made.

Modern government has some schisms and fractures, but no Great Rift. It isn't prone to great narratives. We have no need of Mr Blair's Messiah Politics. The next generation of politicians have to be midwives to a painful evolution of the welfare state and maybe of post-materialist consumption. We need to understand and nurture political and managerial elites in Westminster and Whitehall. These people will have difficult and quite tedious work to do, and will make many mistakes. We need to elect, appoint and retain the best talents we can find. These men and women are not likely to be as well paid as they would be in the private sector. So they will need to be rewarded in respect.

The details of modern representative government will have to be negotiated. Should Civil Servants be more accountable to Parliament, or to ministers, or to their own structures? Can we outsource even more Whitehall functions? How strong should political parties be? What does proper consultation look like? Is politics a profession or a hobby?

What matters first is to get it across that a Prime Minister is only as good as his ministers, and ministers are only as good as their civil servants. And the core of all that is that the PM isn't a visionary, a rock star, a protestor, or a campaigner. He isn't a father to his people, as one suspects Brown would like to be. I know that politics is a retail business. It has to flirt with populism and appearances. But the public are ready to accept that PMs - and all other politicians and civil servants - need to respect and be respected within a great tradition which they can reform but must not traduce. The baby boomer way needs to be history. I am a conservative, and have a certain faith that the Tories will "get" this stuff quicker than anyone else. The LibDems could be very helpful in applauding anyone else who gets it. In the unlikely event of Labour really getting it, they might be rewarded with another term of office.

Richard D. North is the author of Mr Blair's Messiah Politics: Or what happened when Bambi tried to save the world (Social Affairs Unit, 2006) and its 2007 digital update Mr Blair's Messiah Politics: A story of inspired government, 1997-2007.

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Nevertheless, the assistant general secretary's remarks were at least tangentially true. I have noticed, for example, that prisoners sent out to NHS hospitals often beg to return to prison rather than stay another day in them. The food is better, or at least more copious, in prison; the social atmosphere better. There is more laughter in prison than in hospital; psychiatric patients are often treated more humanely in prison than by the psychiatric services of the NHS. In part, I suspect, this is because prisons have a relatively clear chain of command by comparison with the continual power-struggles that wrack the NHS.

In addition, about a third of prisoners, according to my rough estimate, prefer life in prison to life outside. They used to tell me this in confidence, sotto voce, so that the others did not hear: for to admit that you actually liked prison, and got on well with the officers, was to lose caste, to appear weak and even sissy.

The rather surprising preference of some prisoners for life in prison first occurred to me (and induced me to ask prisoners the question) when I saw them returning to prison and greeting the staff like long-lost friends. On one occasion, a remand prisoner returned from his court appearance in a state of high dudgeon. I asked him why he was so angry. He said:

I got three months.

Good result? Three months is no use to me. I was hoping for at least twelve.

Incapable of self-regulation, they nevertheless like routine, predictability and boundaries. These prison provides for them, often for the only time in their lives; they have never achieved them for themselves. Prison is for them a refuge from chaos, the nearest thing they will ever know to a spiritual retreat.

The chaos of their lives can hardly be exaggerated. Their relations with women are so unstructured, and bring them so much grief in the sense of aggravation, that escape from the female presence (it is rarely company) is also a relief for them. Any nagging sense of responsibility for the children that they have carelessly fathered is also suspended while they are in prison, and they are glad of it. If freedom entails responsibility, they want none of it.

I am here only relating and paraphrasing what many prisoners have told me themselves. It is possible, of course, that they told me what they thought I wanted to hear, though they were not generally so considerate or obliging, and I did my best not to mould their answers to my questions. In any case, their conduct often suggested a willingness or even eagerness to go to prison: such is the demoralisation of our police force that you almost have to make special efforts to be apprehended by it, let alone apprehended by it repeatedly, as recidivists by definition were.

All of this would suggest to some people that our prisons are indeed too cushy, too comfortable; if life is better inside than out for many young men, then the easiest solution to the problem would be to make life inside a good deal less comfortable, until it no longer seemed preferable to life outside.

While I can see the logic of this, I fear it as a proposal because it could so easily give free rein to the potential sadist that lurks, if not in every human breast, then at least in many human breasts. And the scope for sadism in enclosed institutions is very great.

I do not know whether, had I worked in prisons in the 1920s, say, I should have found the same mentality among prisoners. Probably: for, where human beings are concerned, there is nothing new under the sun. It is the numbers that alarm me. I suspect that they are far larger than they used to be, for our social mechanism of producing sturdily independent and responsible adults, what used to be known as the free-born Englishman, has been comprehensively, and I suspect deliberately, smashed up.

Theodore Dalrymple is a writer and worked for many years as an inner city and prison doctor. He is the author of the author of Junk Medicine: Doctors, Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy.

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Blunt has been even more effectively boxed in by the Queen's knowing needling about fakes and misattribution to the barrack-room art history of his secret service interrogator. Each is tormented in the appropriate way. When the extrovert attention-seeker Burgess asks what they are saying about him back home, Coral Browne punishes him with her pity. Nothing very much, she replies, and is willing to seek out the clothes he requests because she "feels sorry" for him. Blunt, who craved privacy and respectability, is pursued by a secret serviceman of such PC-plod transparency that he attracts the attention of Blunt's students. Towards the end of the piece the inevitable exposure looms.

Of the two, we feel sorrier for Burgess who has almost shrunk from his former bull-like dimensions to fit the frame of a fey and fragile Havers. When Burgess is serenaded by his Russian companion, Tolya, it is tempting to feel that he has suffered enough. The Climate of Treason - to borrow the title of Andrew Boyle's classic - may have sunny spells (which burst through in Burgess’s forced eulogies on the vitality of the Soviet system), but it is essentially inhospitable.

The two plays are less eloquent on the question of motivation. Coral Browne asks Burgess straight out why he did it. Because he responds, "it seemed the right thing to do at the time"; Blunt says something very similar to his MI5 interrogator. Interestingly, Bennett places very little stress on the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union against Nazism, which the traitors themselves often cited in their own defence.

What both pieces show brilliantly is the nature of concealment. Bennett's Burgess reminds us that he never denied his homosexuality or his communist sympathies. This openness became his best disguise: surely somebody so obvious could not be a spy. Burgess hid in plain sight. Bennett's Blunt is continuing his game of hide and seek even after his unmasking. His fascination with Titian - as a series of probing exchanges show - is a reflection of his own predicament and our own obsession with the spying game. As the piece unfolds, the painting more and more resembles a Russian (Soviet?) doll as the various layers are stripped away and x-rayed to reveal more figures, first a third man (Philby), then a fourth (Blunt himself) and finally a fifth (still the subject of speculation). Bennett's point is that there will always be another man: our imagination requires it. And - he wonders - does it really matter whether he exists or not?

Does it matter? That is a question which Bennett often asks in both plays. It is a phrase that trips easily from the lips of a Burgess and a Blunt, to whom few things matter much and most don't matter at all.

In the end, there is actually very little doubt where Bennett himself stands. Coral Browne tells Burgess bluntly that he

pissed in our soup and we drank it.

The treason which Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt and Cairncross committed may not have mattered much to their friends, but for many brave men and women fighting on the other side of the iron curtain against communist dictatorship British treason meant imprisonment and even death. It did matter.

The author thanks Dr Anita Bunyan for her comments on this piece.

Dr Brendan Simms is Reader in the History of International Relations at the Centre of International Studies at the University of Cambridge and co-President of the Henry Jackson Society.

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It stills feels like a backwater, though, and in a good way. The woman who sells you your granary loaf (88p) in Lavenham has plenty of time to tell you about her 48-year-old son who still lives at home and it becomes clear in conversation that she has hardly ever left Suffolk. As you drive around the county you are often zig-zagging at right angles across an empty flat landscape. These are not the straight roads of a Roman or Napoleonic planner, but former tracks joining up the dots of settlement. I even had a hint of local politics, drinking a pint of Adnams with most of Aldeburgh council as they cursed the County Council before crossing the road to their ancient town hall, formerly a moot hall, where they have to duck under the five foot high doorway.

If I can invoke the complex, contested concept which seems to worry the hell out of people these days, Suffolk is the most "English" of places. This is partly because the claim of Victorian historians like J. R. Green that the English are essentially (rather than partially) "Anglo-Saxon", which we have absorbed to some degree and foreigners have absorbed even more, seems to be really true here. Romans and Normans penetrated these wet flatlands less than they did other places and names, patterns of settlement, perhaps even DNA, is more distinctively Saxon (or Anglo-Saxon) here than elsewhere.

Indeed the county's greatest pilgrimage these days is to Sutton Hoo, the boat-burial place of Saxon kings on a ridge above the River Deben where the greatest hoard of Saxon treasure was discovered in 1939. We owe this discovery to a medieval farmer whose ploughing lopped off one end of a barrow and thus inadvertently fooled later (mainly Tudor) looters as to where any treasure might be located, but it changed our view of history and the "Dark Ages" because of the high quality of workmanship and the items with origins in Byzantium and India.

You could argue that there isn't much to Sutton Hoo as it stands because most of the artefacts are in the British Museum, leaving a field full of bumps and a shed with a pedagogic display on the Anglo-Saxons. But our guide, a lady whose age I found difficult to estimate, made it all a five star experience, bringing life and atmosphere to her tale of ghostly visions and the dogged determination of the local, thirty-bob-a-week, archaeologist, Basil Brown.

If another feature of Englishness is the dissolute, devil-may-care, heroically eccentric aristocracy, then the greatest of all may be found in Suffolk: the Herveys of Ickworth with their rotunda of a house which they furnished on a four year trip to the Mediterranean. Their sexual history is jaw dropping and it may be that the tradition is not dead: Lady Isabella Hervey (born 1982) has been voted (among other things) "World's Sexiest Aristocrat".

But Suffolk excels generally at the English art of re-inventing itself to fit what we think it should have been. If I had a pound for everything I saw or consumed which was "traditional" or "Suffolk" (or even both) I would have left the county with a large profit. It's strong on real ale, of course, with Adnam's of Southwold and Greene King of Bury St. Edmunds. And real food: dressed crab from a fisherman's hut on Aldeburgh's shingle beach, excellent kippers for breakfast, splendid platters of traditional Suffolk cheeses (none of which existed thirty years ago), local bacon, sausages and so on. Anyone who thinks that the campaigns for English food and "local sourcing" led by Gordon Ramsay, Rick Stein et al. have not had effect should visit Suffolk.

Most impressive of all is the traditional Suffolk wildlife engineered by the combined efforts of the National Trust, Nature Conservancy, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and local authorities. As we entered Southwold a marsh harrier reared up over the car: there was once thought to be only a single breeding pair left in the country. Bitterns boomed over Minsmere; they were once thought to be completely gone from the British mainland. We sat for some time watching two avocets, each standing on one leg with its heads tucked underneath its wing as if trying to ignore the vulgarities of the ducks and terns squawking around them.

And architecturally, Lavenham is the most perfect medieval town. That is to say, it is actually early Tudor, but Suffolk was, as ever, behind the times and its eccentrically shaped and leaning timber-frame buildings completely fulfil our image of the medieval.

As a man of the hills I have to concede that flat land is a great deal more varied and interesting than I tend to assume. The Sussex Coast Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty contains reed beds, mudflats, woodlands, coastal heaths, inland heaths and shingle as well as farmland and every kind of river, mere, broad, dyke and pond. From most of them you can see the largest building in the region, which is the nuclear power station at Sizewell. It looks like a cross between a very large warehouse and a mosque. For some people this might be thought to "ruin" the place. But you could take the more inclusive view of my eldest son towards the concept of the seaside. Sniffing disdainfully at Cape Cod he remarked that,

This is not real seaside. Real seaside smells of chips and you can always see a nuclear power station.

You get to Thorpeness by walking north from Aldeburgh, either up the beach or on the path through the nature reserve inland. As you approach the skyline is dominated by two buildings which appear to be a normal East Anglian clapboard house suspended over a forest and a Norman castle. They are in fact "the house in the clouds" (you can google it – and rent it for up to £3000 a week) and a block of flats in the shape of a Norman castle. In the nineteenth century Thorpeness was a small fishing village rumoured to be involved with smuggling.

But in the first third of the twentieth century G. Stuart Ogilvie (1858-1932) turned it into a holiday village where people could live as if "in Merrie England". Ogilvie was a Scot, a lawyer, a would-be playwright and a friend of J. M. Barrie. He made his big money investing in Russian railways. His village is not quite like anything else: a place of timber-framed houses and 1928 almshouses, of duck ponds and boating lakes, but also of tennis courts and golf courses. William Morris and Robert Blatchford meet Betjemanesque sporty suburbia - an alternative place to set The Prisoner or Hot Fuzz or an episode of Midsomer Murders. There is some evidence that people are slightly ashamed of Thorpeness: it doesn't feature at all on the County Council's website map of the county and it has been voted "weirdest place in England". But I think it is a fine, if extreme, example of the English ability to let fantasy mould reality.

Lincoln Allison retired from an academic career in 2004 to become a freelance writer and broadcaster. He remains Emeritus Reader in Politics at the University of Warwick and Visiting Professor in sport and leisure at the University of Brighton.

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Common Reading once again puts before us a series of sharp, witty, wry observations, often provoked by indolent and widely-accepted generalisations. Collini is a master at the pitiless yet not vindictive or persecuting dissection of a departed second-rater, such as A. L. Rowse (of the writers considered in this collection, perhaps only Empson possessed a really original and outstanding mind). The effect of this gentle, almost affectionate, flaying is often delightful (only in the essay on Roger Scruton is Collini betrayed into overt aggression); and there aren't many critics writing today who can make at least this reviewer laugh out loud.

But the reader begins to notice within himself a growing desire for something more substantial. Common Reading is rather like a meal consisting of a choice of amuse-bouches, a series of palate-cleansing sorbets, and an espresso. All perfect in their way, of course; but your hopes, as you tucked in your napkin and grasped your cutlery, had been framed along more ample lines.
‘
"Probably no writer wishes to be remembered primarily as a reviewer", Collini observes à propos Rebecca West (p. 43). In the course of several of these chapters he writes with feeling of the reviewer's habitual discontents – the drudgery of the daily task, the pernicious need to stimulate in yourself responses to books to which naturally you have no response at all, the dictated quality of the work. The reviewer is a jellyfish on the sea of literature, blown by the winds and drawn by the tides, an involuntary (and therefore oddly innocent) stinger of the unchosen victims who come within reach of his tentacles.

One such was Philip Waller, whose massive historical study of literary culture in Britain at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918 (Oxford, 2006) landed on Collini's desk. Collini is, I think rightly, exasperated by the book's shapelessness, by the prodigality with which Waller simply heaped up a rich pile of materials and then could not be bothered seriously to investigate them (p. 238):

It is not easy to say what this book is about, other than by amplifying its subtitle. It is not held together by a single argument; indeed, there is practically no analysis of any kind in it. . . . there is scarcely a breath of argument, no hint as to which elements might be most significant, complete silence on whether some things may have been the cause of others. Although the book's bibliography includes various items of secondary scholarship on the topics he treats, there is no explicit engagement with their claims, no sense of whether he is extending or revising historiographical orthodoxies.

Perhaps Collini is now becoming too comfortable in this form. He could extend himself in two directions. Notwithstanding his wise misgivings about them, he could construct more ambitious arguments. And he could write about figures with whom he found it less easy to feel superior. Reviewing Nicola Lacey's biography of H. L. A. Hart, Collini notes that the material she has collected would serve the needs of "a more analytical and less biographical account" (p. 293). Collini might redress the balance of his own writing in a similar direction.

David Womersley is Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford. His previous reviews for the Social Affairs Unit can be read here.

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The essence of it is that he doesn't much dispute the evidence which the IPCC uses. What he loathes is its handling of the evidence.

By the end of Chapter 1, we are on better ground. Lord Lawson suggests it might be wise to proceed by taking the IPCC's account of the science as serious if not "settled". Here, we get to the understanding that even if the "consensus" view of climate change were scientifically right, there's a lot left to talk about.

From now on the book is useful. Lord Lawson's view is that the more one digs into the IPCC's analysis of the consequences of climate change the less one finds a need for hysteria. The heart of the thing is that even if we could do it or were willing to do it, there'd be very little point in trying to stop climate change from happening.

This will surprise those who don't plough through IPCC material. The IPCC's material is mostly so dull and convoluted that one suspects it may have been designed to hide secrets. The truth is, as Lord Lawson shows, that the IPCC insists that even if climate change turns out to be quite bad, it won't stop the world - rich and poor countries alike - being much richer than either are now.

Lord Lawson also notes that if things are at the bad end of the IPCC's worst imaginings - then it is even less likely that any conceivable action could have staved off disaster.

It's the economy, stupid
It follows (though the IPCC and others don't tell us so) that if action to head off climate change dents economic growth, and dents the economic growth of the poor world most, it will only leave the least prepared less equipped to deal with its effects.

It also follows that we need to understand how expensive heading off climate change may be. Lord Lawson's view is that it will cost an enormous amount, and to prove it we need only see how little high fuel prices have dented Western fossil fuel use. If it were cheap to get into other fuels, we'd be doing it a lot faster. Besides, we're rich and like cars far more powerful than we need.

Here we get to Lord Lawson's bête noire: Sir Nicholas Stern and his famous review. Rightly, what upsets Lawson is that Stern is supposed to be an economist, and an official one at that, but produced a politician's - an evangelical politician's - account of the issue. Like many people, Lord Lawson also thinks that Sir Nicholas cooked the books in his application of discount rates (the hypothetical balancing of the value we should place on the future). In effect Sir Nicholas assumed we all care about the future and about foreigners as much he presumably does.

Anyway, it is very likely that stopping climate change is mission impossible whilst enriching the world is more or less inevitable. The great merit of adaptation is that it doesn't require enormous amounts of goodwill. As Lord Lawson says,

… adaptation is essentially a matter of a large number of local and practical measures, which require no international treaty or worldwide agreement for their implementation.

Lord Lawson's reasoning has some of the force one would expect of an economically-literate, hard-bitten Tory politician who has always taken an interest in Third World realities. It isn't so much that he knows mysterious arcana. It's more that he is supremely confident that he knows the way the world wags and knows that such good as can be done has to be done cannily. He shows us (rather as, very differently, Sir David King also has [his book reviewed here]) that hardly anyone believes what they say about climate change. The politics of the thing (as George Monbiot has ruefully admitted [his book reviewed here]) depends on leaders being able to say they care whilst noting that action is scuppered by someone else.

Lord Lawson is dismissive of the present attempts to address climate change, even in their own terms. He says few economists warm to the "cap and trade" systems which have been the main plank of policy. The notion is to dole out greenhouse gas quotas and let these be bought and sold. Leave aside that the quotas are too large to bear down on the problem. Lord Lawson thinks things might have gone better if firms had at least had to bid for the initial quota. But basically, the system is prone to corruptions of every sort. Low and gently rising world-wide taxes would be a better way of testing the water, and if they were revenue-neutral (that is, if carbon taxes replaced other taxes) would do little harm. This all seems about right.

A rather gloomy conclusion
The likelihood is that this book will have few readers, and many of them will be professionally disposed to loudly dismiss it. (Welcome to the world of opinion-forming, where books are written to be talked about more than read.) His critics will be helped by Lord Lawson's Tiggerishness. Never mind that at one point he suggests that dish-washing machines are useful because sink-washing is unhygienic. More oddly, he suggests that man's adaptability is very great and proves it by remarking that the temperature difference between Scandinavia and Singapore is much bigger than the difference posited between the present and the future global figures. So we'll manage fine. Tell that, the old hippy in me protests, to the African whose life has hovered for millennia on the brink of extreme desiccation and doesn't fancy his chances if the heat is notched up a few more degrees.

I fear this may be the difficulty with Lord Lawson's way of thinking. He's too optimistic. He thinks climate change doesn't matter. He doesn't discuss how parts of the earth may quite quickly be put beyond habitability. The likely candidates are not easy to predict and the rest of the world does not care. So the point is not what very nice people may do about climate change: it is what most of us will do. Not much, as Lord Lawson is dead right to observe. I don't think it'll matter much. But it might matter to some people a lot more than Lord Lawson thinks.

Richard D. North is the author of Rich is Beautiful: A Very Personal Defence of Mass Affluence and Scrap the BBC!: Ten Years to Set Broadcasters Free. For an earlier analysis of the politics of climate change by Richard D. North, see: G8 Gleneagles Fiasco: a sceptic's account of global warming and its humbugs.

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The Second Plane is a collection of Amis's journalism written in the aftermath of 9/11, to which have been added two fictional pieces exploring the moral geography created by the attack on the Twin Towers: "In the Palace of the End" and "The Last Days of Muhammad Atta". After the Holocaust, the assumption got about in literary circles that atrocity somehow disables art or makes it irrelevant. In the grip of that assumption, the writers of the West were momentarily frozen on that first day of our cowardly new world (p. 11):

After a couple of hours at their desks, on September 12, 2001, all the wr