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Of course, he is not alone among sportsmen: many of them have this primitive and menacing deportment. What is more, the crowd watching Murray at Wimbledon displays no better self-control. It screams and shouts at every turn, whether it be from excitement, disappointment, anxiety, encouragement, joy, and so forth. I think it can safely be assumed that the crowd is not composed in the main of members of the British underclass.

When I pointed this all out to a friendly acquaintance of mine, he immediately resorted to one of the two arguments that reassure people that all is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds. He said, "It was always like that". And, of course, if it was always like that, it was the best we can do.

But it was not always like that, even within living memory. It is true that I now have difficulty in imagining what the world was like before there were personal computers, but that does not mean that personal computers have always existed.

Indeed, I spent two thirds of my life before they were very widespread, and much of that two thirds before they were even known. How soon we come to accept the present moment as the normal, and eternal, order of things!

Tennis players used not to snarl and punch and swear. Crowds, at least at Wimbledon, did not scream and shout at every point. This can be verified by films of the period. Therefore, something has happened to the comportment of large numbers of people – I should say a loss of self-control, and perhaps of an awareness that self-control is desirable and necessary.

Confronted with evidence that there really has been a change, those who at first say "It has always been like that" (no decent self-respecting liberal, in the American sense, ever fails to bring up Gin Lane when talking about mass public drunkenness in Britain), then resort to another argument: yes, they say, there has been a change, but we must just accpet it. The genie is out of the bottle and cannot be put back; the eggs have been scrambled and can't be returned to their pre-cooked state. Not Time's, but Change's arrow flies in one direction only. That is why, in Ireland, there will be referenda on the Treaty of Lisbon
until the population gets it right, and then there will be no further referenda on the matter.

Is it true, though, that change can be in one direction only? Is it really inconceivable that the All England Club could do nothing about the hysterics in the crowd who control their expostulations no better than cows excreting in a field? The answer is obviously "No".

All it would have to do is make a rule that anyone shouting in the crowd would be expelled forthwith, this being a condition of admission in the first place. I doubt that it would take more than a few such expulsions for the crowd to pipe down and behave in a more seemly manner.

Needless to say, in the days when people were not so incontinently expressive of their excitement during what was, after all, only a sporting contest, it was not fear of expulsion that caused them to control themselves. It did not occur to them to scream and shout in the first place. They did not feel inclined to do it because they had not been brought up to do it, nor did they think it correct to do it. Habit became character, as it always does.

Clearly a society in which people who behave well because it is in their character to behave well is superior to one in which people behave well because of fear of the consequences to them if they behave otherwise. A crowd that behaves will in a self-regulating way is better than one that behaves well because there are stewards everywhere waiting to expel malefactors. But if the All England Club were to act as I propose, the self-control of the crowd would soon become habitual and no expulsions would be necessary.

I am not, of course, so much of an optimist as to expect my modest proposal to be taken up. Decadence, after all, is the belief that the undesirable is inevitable.

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 and In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas.

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The answer, of course, is by means of his prejudiced understanding of the world. He looks at his potential fare and asks himself, "Is this the kind of person who might refuse to pay me at the end of the journey", or do what is known in the trade as "a runner"? And if it is, he asks for the money in advance.

What, exactly, does he look for? He does not have a checklist, of course, of the kind that bureaucrats like to introduce in their attempt to eliminate the untoward from human existence. No: their judgment is global and instantaneous. Does the fare have the look of feral malignity that is now so very common? Does he have the stigmata of violence, such as scars and certain kinds of tattoos? Does he speak in an aggressive and contemptuous way, and is he likely to be armed? Is he of the age of wrongdoing? Is he dressed respectably, or has he adopted the international costume of the antisocial young man? Is he drunk or perhaps under the influence of drugs? What race is he (the Chinese always pay their fares)? The driver takes this all in instantaneously, as a chess player takes in the overall situation on the chessboard.

Of course, his prejudiced understanding of the world, based partly on experience, partly on hearsay, and no doubt partly on personal taste or distaste, will sometimes lead him to false conclusions. A nasty-looking drunk may have every intention of paying his fare; a respectably-dressed man in a business suit might be planning to swindle or even rob him. Appearances can be deceptive, and no doubt often are.

But he has little else to go by and has to make a decision very quickly. There may be more rejoicing in heaven over the repentance of one unjust man, etc., but among taxi-drivers there is more regret over one wrong judgment about such a matter than over ninety-nine duly-paid fares. And if a taxi driver failed to exercise his judgment in this way, we should feel correspondingly less sympathy for him when he was assaulted or cheated.

What the taxi driver does (and what the police obviously think he is entitled and perhaps ought to do), is what we do all the time in our daily lives. Our mistakes may be grievous ones: when I saw pictures of Mr Madoff, I thought, "What a kindly, calm, intelligent, far-seeing expression he has, just the kind of man to whom I should have liked to entrust my savings, had I known about him".

But the possibility of error should not deter us from making prejudiced judgments, for the suspension of such judgments is also a judgment of a kind, and one that is likely to be far worse in effect overall than their maintenance. Of course, no prejudice should be so strong that no evidence or experience to the contrary can change it, either about individuals or about groups of people who share certain characteristics.

The pretence that one can approach the world without prejudice is dishonest and absurd. The sleep of prejudice brings forth bureaucratic monsters. It is to go into the world without the faintest idea about where one might find the things one is looking for.

If the police really had no prejudices, the consequences for the population would be truly dreadful. Old ladies with Zimmer frames, going slowly and painfully to fetch their bread and their milk, would be equally the object of their attentions as the young men in nylon tracksuits, hoods and baseball caps, who hung about on street corners all day.

The failure to make the most obvious judgments leads to vicious absurdity. I recall the case of one young man of Indian extraction who was set upon by three young louts with a long history of violence. The young man was thoroughly respectable, as well as being self-evidently mild-mannered; but the three louts accused him of having attacked them first, an accusation so prima facie absurd that one would have thought no one could entertain it for a moment. But, in the name of equity, the police treated it as seriously as the young man's accusation against them, which was far from absurd. They charged him as well as the three louts; and offered to drop the charges only if he dropped the charges against the three louts.

That is justice in a society that claims to be without prejudice.

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 and In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas.

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Though I suppose as a football fan I could have given them a chorus of, "You're Welsh and you know you are . . " Forty per cent of the population of the US claim to be partly Irish and virtually none Welsh, though how many wouldn't have an ancestor called Jones, Davies etc. ?

This reveals a Welsh problem: lack of a global brand image. Everybody in that classroom had heard of Ireland and had an image of the Kennedys, Guinness, the IRA et al. For Scotland they had whisky, tartan, Highlands, golf. But Wales? OK, we have rugby, choirs, loquacious politicians, but none of this gets much beyond the British Isles.

The poor old Welsh are not called by their proper name (Cymru, Cymraig) but by the derivation of a Saxon word meaning foreign. The French name, Pays de Galles, makes the place sound like some sort of reservation for Ancient Gauls while Victorian racial theory portrayed them as Ancient Brits hiding in the hills.

I remark, too, that anti-Welsh prejudice is one of the most acceptable and you can always get away with the Bernard Manning formula: "Just to be serious for a minute, I believe in the unity of human beings. I think we should all get together, Muslim and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, black and white . . . . and kick shit out of the fucking Welsh".

But Wales is in many respects much nicer than England - or than most places, for that matter. It is beautiful and fairly empty and, though English tourists sometimes complain that they find it unfriendly, I have often found the opposite if you are there for a purpose. Pre-satnav, you arrived in an English village and asked a lady in the street the way to the cricket club she was likely to say something like, "Oh! I do believe there is a cricket club - somebody mentioned it. Could it be on the road up towards the golf club?"

In the Valleys it goes, "You'll be the boys from Warwick, then? I should imagine we'll be seeing you in the Glendwr this evening?" Only in Wales have I known pub landladies to replace the bat grip for a visiting batsman!

Wales has the same population and area as Slovenia. Its mountains are not so high, but its thousand miles or so of coastline, including 44 beaches which officially rank in Europe's highest category, considerably outrank Slovenia's 25-mile coastline. Twenty per cent of Wales is National Park (a world record so far as I know) and if you add Areas of Outstanding National Beauty, in some respects second division national parks, this goes up to 40%.

Many sports fans think that the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff is the finest in Europe, if not the world. Welsh is undoubtedly the most genuinely "living" of the Celtic languages. And in 2008 the Welsh had considerable and disproportionate sporting success. The national rugby team won the 6-Nations, which is what really matters, Cardiff City got to the FA Cup Final, Joe Calzaghe acquired more world boxing titles than anyone else and Sam Thomas rode Denman to victory in the Cheltenham Gold Cup. All this might be some consolation for the average house price being lower than in any other part of the British Isles.

But what I most want to praise the Welsh for is their curious sense of national identity which allows sentiment to flow freely while more or less avoiding substance. Compare the singing of the Welsh national anthem in the Millennium Stadium with God Save the Queen sung at an English stadium or those dreadful insolent dirges Flower of Scotland or The Star Spangled Banner. (Incidentally, you can compare them - many versions - on YouTube within minutes.)

There is no comparison: the Welsh version is powerful, unambiguous collective emotion, exciting and slightly frightening, the rest flawed and limited by comparison. On TV the camera normally seeks out some fat guy, with his red welsh jersey and "Brains" written across his chest. And this chap, who probably wouldn't weep for any other reason, is blubbering at the sheer concentrated Welshness of it all as he belts out GWLAD . . . GWLAD (literally "land . . . land", but often translated as "Wales . . . Wales").

For those who don't know, "Brains" written across his heart isn't his nickname and it doesn't express his respect for intellectual activity; it is actually the name of the Cardiff brewer which sponsors the national team.

Yet this same guy will tell you over a pint that North Walians are tedious bastards and the language issue is a pain in the arse (I've done the research on this, believe me). And, historically, it has proved difficult to persuade him to vote even for very mild forms of devolution. Compare that with the political histories of two other rugby-playing nations, Ireland and South Africa, which are so fucked-up they have to sing two anthems to keep everybody happy.

The Welsh don't have the prickliness of the Scots and the Irish; they put themselves down as the English do and there are a number of Welsh intellectuals (including one who writes regularly for the Social Affairs Unit) who make running down their nationality a minor theme of their discourse.

In short, Welsh national identity gives you the sentiment - and in its purest form - without the bullshit and the political instability. The huge contradictions and ambiguities of identity, which tear other people apart, just don't matter in Wales and, as a result, there is a certain innocence to the celebration of national identity And which other country's football league has ever offered you a fixture between Cefyn Druids and Total Network Solutions? (Ancient un' modern, innit, see!)

This article was originally meant to celebrate my 30th and final cricket tour of Wales - 1978-2008, missing only 1980 because of the birth of a child. But guess what happened? We played the first game in England, crossed the border, then it rained . . and it rained . . . and it rained. Not a ball was bowled on the other side of Offa's Dyke. Typical, you might think. But not so: in 30 years we have played 95% of the cricket we were supposed to play. But I am not going out on a damp squib like that. All being well, I shall return this year.

Lincoln Allison retired from an academic career at the University of Warwick in 2004 - and again in 2008 - 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. His latest book is The Disrespect Agenda: Or How the Wrong Kind of Niceness Is Making Us Weak and Unhappy.

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Dr David Starkey, with whom I have crossed swords myself, chose to knock Scotland while we were there. He said on Any Questions that the Scots were now a "feeble" nation and The Scotsman published a whole page of reactions including leader articles and letters. They all said, in different ways, that they were not feeble and that they jolly well didn't care about what Dr David Starkey or any other arrogant, patronising nobody of an Englishman said about Scotland.

And they all said it without noticing what logicians call the "pragmatic contradiction", the incompatibility between the content of a statement and its existence. Of course they cared: why, otherwise, would you bother to write? It's like the adolescent who screams, "I just don't care what you think about me!" (I’ve seen it on soap operas.) And the concern is not reciprocated: the Scots, Americans, Europeans or whoever can say what they like about the English without exciting much more than murmurs of agreement or "They would think that, wouldn't they?"

When I used to write pieces about places an editor once warned me, "You can say what you like about London, but if you're rude about Dundee you'll have some nutter knocking you door down". And when he said "nutter" he meant I would, likely as not, get nutted.

So: Scotland the Experience. In this case, rather special, because I/we decided that next time we went to Scotland maybe we'd be too old to do all the things we'd ever meant to do in Scotland like hiring a ghillie and climbing Ben Nevis.

But how does Scotland the Experience relate to Scotland the Politics, because I have to say that I do not think that David Starkey's view is entirely misplaced and, much as I love being in Scotland, there are aspects of Scottish nationalism and even Scottish identity which do put me well in touch with my patronising and arrogant side. In particular, I find much that is worthy of disrespect in the general aspirations and worldview shared by members of the Scottish political and intellectual elite.

Many years ago Malcolm Muggeridge used to chair a Sunday night discussion on BBC television called The Question Why. When they covered nationalism the debate was, if I recall it correctly, confined to Scotland. On one end of Muggeridge's panel sat some old colonel in a kilt who said that Scotland must separate from England because England was decadent and permissive while on the other sat some bejeaned hairy student (who is probably a knight of the realm by now) who said that independence must be declared because England was essentially capitalist, imperialist and crypto-fascist.

There is a "Beam me up, Scotty" dimension to nationalism which makes it the politics of unreality. A key text here is Oh What a Lovely War: you may recall the Christmas truce when the guns start up again the German soldier says something like, "Your guns are firing, Tommy". To which the Scottish soldier replies, "That isnae us, that's the bloody English".

That isnae us: redefining your national identity at crucial points can be very convenient. One can be British or non-British, even ant-British as suits. It is demonstrable that somewhere between two thirds and three quarters of Scots support any opposition to any English national team in a number of sports, but especially in football. If you ask Scots whether this is serious they divide quite sharply on whether it is a kind of friendly joke rivalry or a genuine enmity. But I have never reciprocated it, though I do notice that my sons and their friends do take special pleasure in Scottish sporting humiliations.

Once there was a Scotland which was British-patriotic and conservative. When you thought of Scotland you conjured up images of its righteous church and the dour engineers and tough soldiers who had formed the empire. Orwell suggested that we, the English, thought of the Scots as more like ourselves than we were. In the 1955 General Election the Scottish Conservative vote was proportionately greater than the English. This is still the Scotland of People's Friend and The Sunday Post, but it is certainly not the official Scotland.

On a tour of the Edinburgh parliament a couple of years ago we were told how proud Scots were of their advanced electoral system and progressive social policies. (Cynics might say they need some social progress. While we were there just now Dundee University was changing its mind about an honorary degree for a certain playwright because it transpired that when a student there he had half-killed a fellow student just for looking at him. His excuse was that he came from Dunfermline and that's the way they did things there.)

The change of identity is stated even at the border. Just beyond Carlisle you are bid Failte. One imagines Adam Smith and David Hume and a hundred other great North British minds tittering at bewilderment at this use of the Gaelic language at a spot when you still have hundreds of miles to go before you get to anywhere where it was ever spoken. This seems to be part of a national determination to establish some sort of linguistic separation from England. There are websites devoted to the "Scots language" and there have been academic suggestions that "Lallans" - the Lowland dialect - should be worked up into a written language, much as nationalists turned Cape Dutch into Afrikaans.

Pretty well all Scots throw more distinctive words into their discourse than they used to. The commonest I remarked were "outwith" meaning "from without" (really exciting - we've got much more interesting dialect words in Lancashire) and "dreich" meaning "wearisome", but usually applied to the weather. I think English people should take to using these words regularly, as we took to "glamour", the Gaelic word for magic.

Though I admit to a certain scorn about the fall-back pretence that Gaelic is in some way the language of Scotland I would want to counterbalance this by hoping for the survival of the language and the culture and style which goes with it.

Of course, I don't understand it, but visiting the Western Isles, where it does belong, you cannot help noticing that the accent and conversational style of people rooted in that culture is a great deal richer and more attractive than most Southern English speech.

Finlay MacDonald remarks how Gaelic-speaking boys, for whom the learning of English was the educational priority, derived a great deal of humour from the sloppiness of our mongrel language. Male poultry has the same name as a penis! And a penis is an "organ", which is something the more liberal religious sects play with in church!

But the use of Gaelic just beyond Carlisle is surely part of Native Victim Identification Syndrome, well familiar to visitors to New Zealand, Australia or Canada. In the Glencoe Visitor Centre they play a DVD in which a lady from Sterling University explains that the massacre was not really about the Campbells and the MacDonalds, but about the genocidal policies of the British Government.

Am I being paranoid when I assume that many people will identify this as the English? Whereas it would be much less misleading to say that what went on was part of a European conflict and concerned two contenders for the authority of the "British Government" - and that these contenders had their roots in Scotland, Holland and France more than in England. And if it were me I'd mention that the winning side ushered in the greatest period of liberty and prosperity known to mankind at that time. And, of course, the Clan Donald were not exactly wiped out since I'm married to one (Irish branch).

In Macbeth (Act 4, Scene 3) Macduff asks:

Stand Scotland where it did?

Alas, poor country!
Almost afraid to know itself. It cannot
Be called our country, but our grave . . .

And there is a "feebleness", defined by being heavily subsidised by another country. Though one should put this in comparative perspective: the Soviet Union subsidised the Baltic and Trans-Caucasian states in similar ways and for similar reasons. I get the feeling that if young Scots have aspirations they are towards the multi-layered Scottish government and the intellectual and political elite rather than towards enterprise. Most successful businesses in the Highlands seem to be run by people from Northern England.

Yet Scotland is still in the same place - up there, beyond Berwick and Carlisle. I mean this non-trivially; it isn't going to go away and we could never rid ourselves of Scotchmen on the make running our institutions because relations between England and Scotland would be bound to be governed by something along the lines of the Government of Ireland Act of 1949 which said that 26 counties of Ireland constituted a foreign country whose citizens were not foreigners. It would not be like Russia and Georgia: I have listened to Russian academics with Georgian connections crying into their vodka about the reality that I could travel freely to Tbilisi and they could not.

This is not just a different place from there, but a different time from the 1970s when Douglas Hurd and Andrew Osmond's Scotch on the Rocks (1971) described a tense and menacing Anglo- Scottish breakup fraught with the possibilities of civil war. Now, given globalisation and the European Union Scottish independence is something you wouldn't have to take much notice of if you didn't want to.

And at the moment it looks less likely than it did; Alex Salmond, SNP leader and First Minister, has expressed his aspirations to independence in terms of the strength of Scotland’s energy and financial sectors, so it is looking a great deal less viable than it was even on his own terms. All those Scottish wannabe ambassadors will have to wait a while. So will those among the English looking forward to the schadenfreude of watching Scotland try to pay for its own free-to-user pretend universities.

But I am still intrigued by the sentimental question - introspective, but with aggregate implications - concerning what I would feel about the Hebrides being in a foreign country. Having seen the consequences of Indian sentimentality about Kashmir, having listened to Argentinians talking about a sense of personal loss because their country has no sovereignty over a bunch of damp islands they've never even seen, having heard Serbians swearing grim revenge over Kosovo and witnessed Greeks trembling with rage about the use of the word Macedonia . . . . I have to consider what I would feel like if certain places were no longer part of "my" country!

I don't think it would be a disaster like the De Valera's Irish Free State which experienced the largest emigration in human history (unless you count the specifically Jewish sectors of the Russian Empire). And, given that, I can't say I would care all that much. Being English, I already feel at home in different ways in France, California, Australia and Ireland. The world is my lobster - and Scotland will always be just the other side of Carlisle.

Lincoln Allison retired from an academic career at the University of Warwick in 2004 - and again in 2008 - 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. His latest book is The Disrespect Agenda: Or How the Wrong Kind of Niceness Is Making Us Weak and Unhappy.

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But, like most titillation, the performance does not deliver. Set between the Marquis' arraignment in 1772 and his release from prison in 1790, Yukio Mishima's script frames five women as they discuss Sade's antics over three acts. The man in question is never seen. Renée, his wife, remains surprisingly, but resolutely, faithful until a sudden reversal. Her younger sister doubles up as confidante and his eager servant. Two noblewomen punctuate the tetchy talk with anecdote and moral judgment. Renée's mother disapproves. And that is it.

The result is woeful drama. Stock roles (Mishima has each character represent certain qualities in the style of a mystery play – Dench for example moves not far from her comfort zone as "Law" and "Morality") are made all the more tedious through a clunking script, insensitively translated by Donald Keene (although one senses somehow that the original Japanese also lacked subtlety). Even Pike's undeniable poise and the occasional glimpse of her familiar form fail to salvage the lines she is dealt, while Dench's occasional stumbling speaks for itself.

The dialogue suffers from laboured repetition (in particular, endless reiteration about the passage of time - if only time were passing, one thought to oneself), and an embarrassing frequency of metaphors used to decorate the chatting. Worst of all, Renée is given to philosophical justification of sadistic practice. Doing it is bad enough, but talking about it afterwards is more than cruel.

The stage dynamic created through long speeches might have provoked interesting questions about the way in which Mishima's characters are called upon to respond to events which have happened in the past (almost nothing takes place onstage), but the script falls short of this, and well short of credible exchange.

Some have admired the set and costumes. Stephanie Arditti's feast of crinoline set against the backdrop created by Christopher Oram is indeed an impressive spectacle - at least for the first act. But with each scene change, Pike and Dench's frocks become a slightly different tone, cast in slightly bluer lighting. This does not amount to progress. Aren't such comments about luxurious visuals how we explain away vacuous period drama? All surface, no substance. The difference is that when we are watching Keira Knightley in The Duchess, more is neither expected nor wanted.

The use of a single setting unwittingly lends the drama's exits and entrances an air of farce; another visit from the Comtesse de Saint-Fond (played with energy, albeit predictably by a cruelly typecast Frances Barber), another sexy tit-bit. She confides with glee how the Marquis used her body as an altar in a blasphemous travesty of the Mass, as Baronesse de Simiane tries to conceal her utter fascination. But rather than providing an exciting friction between the domestic façade and what has reportedly gone on behind closed doors, these tales just sound unconvincing. This is not to say we doubt the divine Marquis's zeal for fetishism, but rather to record that we feel let down by the fact that the characters are so crudely drawn.

Michael Grandage's confused production has tarnished his run of success, which includes Twelfth Night and Ivanov. One leaves the theatre having confronted the proximity of pleasure and pain, though in an unexpected way. It is bewildering that a play so excruciating has won a place in what has been otherwise a season of sheer dramatic delight. Still, as de Sade himself said, there is no pleasure greater than an aversion overcome. London's theatre-goers have been given a wonderful opportunity to taste new, unanticipated, but intense pleasures - if they so choose.

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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But all too often having accomplished this initial challenge the selected candidate has a job for life. They don't need to be good.

They don't need to make a difference. Coasting along is enough despite holding a much sought after job. Merely avoiding scandal and turning up occasionally is adequate.

In fact usually even when embroiled in scandal deselection can be averted. After all scandals crop often frequently but deselection is a rare occurrence. The Conservative MP Sir Nicholas Scott was deselected in December 1996 following a vote of no confidence in his Kensington and Chelsea constituency association. The move followed several incidents including his arrest for drink-driving and for failing to stop at a road accident. He had already been through one vote of
confidence but his constituency voted for deselection when he was found in a gutter during the Conservative Party Conference. For many Party members these incidents compounded Scott's behaviour in being among those seeking to undermine Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister.

Another Tory MP Sir George Gardiner was deselected for equivalent outspoken hostility to Thatcher's successor John Major.

More often a sitting MP is forced out through boundary changes. This is not exactly a deselection. Two seats might be merged with sitting MPs of the same Party who both seek selection for the newly drawn constituency.

In the Labour Party in the 1970s and 1980s there was a concerted effort by the Bennites to deselect moderate MPs which had some success.

But overall the deselections have been very rare, probably under 1%. Also as noted they are more usually about an MP not toeing the political line rather than engaging in misconduct. For example Winston Churchill was deselected by Oldham Conservatives in 1903 because of his support for free trade. He subsequently crossed the floor and joined the Liberals.

The recent torrent of stories about MPs abusing their expenses claims at the taxpayers expense - milking the system in the most outrageous manner whether within or outside the rules - creates a sense of public expectation that some of the worst offenders will be deselected. They are right in seeing the challenge not just to the Party leaders to withdraw the whip, or to the miscreants to do the decent thing and stand down but also to grassroots members to sack them.

The selection rules are there and perfectly adequate to facilitatem such action if the will is there. A Tory MP can only be deselected after the convening of a special general meeting of the local Conservative association. An SGM can be organised if it is backed by a petition signed by more than 50 members, or 10 per cent of the total membership, according to the previous year's membership lists.

The petition has to be sent to the secretary of the executive of the association, requesting him or her to convene the meeting. It is not as easy as it sounds. Often Party activists have known their MP for years. Out on the stump. At wine and cheese parties. Often the MP will have helped them - usually people say they have a "good constituency MP". The MP is their friend. They have a sense of loyalty which can blind them to his misconduct.

But however awkward it might be they have a higher loyalty to their party and their country - To throw out the rotten apples and restore confidence in parliament.

Harry Phibbs is a journalist and a Conservative Councillor in Hammersmith and Fulham.

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I fear she overdoes it. Her post-war history of aid is not bad and nods nicely at the late, great Peter Bauer and the very living Paul Collier. In his book, The Bottom Billion [reviewed here], the latter politely hinted that he wasn't fond of the glamorous uselessness of some of the modern show biz and mass support for misconceived ideas about development.

Ms Moyo writes, correctly enough, about the fashions in government aid-giving in the late 20th century and notes - compellingly - that one of the smaller reasons aid failed is that its donors didn't really care whether it succeeded or not. She doesn't stress, but I would, that aid is something which politicians feel the need to be seen to give. They and their voters pitch the level and targets of giving so as to optimise donor satisfaction pretty much irrespective of the likelihood of its being useful. It is to the credit of intelligent donors - ministries or NGOs - when they can also sometimes make good happen.

Ms Moyo instead reasonably enough stresses the vested interest of the quite large aid industry. She lists pretty well the various ways in which it is hard to make unearned-income work well in developing countries - it is inflationary, and distorts markets and so on. And rightly she is tough on its corrupting influence.

However, I think Ms Moyo is rather weak on the modern aid scene. I suspect that sometimes and in some places, well-targeted aid can make a difference. She implies as much when she notes that Chinese involvement in Africa has a dimension which is aid-like, and is at least bringing infrastructure. And I am mildly hopeful that outsiders can sometimes help good government and civil society and maybe provide health and education assistance.

And so to the positive proposals in the book.

Dambisa Moyo rehearses many of the usual things about trade being preferable to aid. She notes that remittances from the diaspora are important. She is more obviously original when she says that African government could raise huge sums of money in the bond market. Just technically, I have no idea whether she is right on this last. Anyway she has a mountain to climb in making such a bold assertion work. And that's to leave aside for the moment the gloomy pieces in the Financial Times which say that capital is fleeing Africa in search ("Do not leave Africa in a scramble", FT, 17 March 2009):

of the safety of rich-country sovereign bonds.

Of course there are chickens and eggs here. I naturally hope that Ms Moyo's book - including its bond proposal - is part of the inspiration for serious transformation. But it will, as Ms Moyo stresses, have to be an African aspiration.

Though part of Ms Moyo's argument is that the West patronises Africa, she says it may be that Western governments should make the first move. They could announce a run-down in aid in the hope of forcing Africa's leaders into her preferred model of government. Ms Moyo accepts that this isn't likely to happen: the aid industry in the West is no more likely to vote for its own extinction than Africa's current leadership is likely to volunteer to end its muddled tyranny.

Far too briskly and as though knowing it's a non-starter, Ms Moyo argues that Western citizens should gang together to wrench the drip-feed of aid from Africa's arm. She says we know how to do it: 60,000 letter-writers persuaded Congress to pass the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act - which made it easier for some sub-Saharan countries to make and sell goods to the US.

Maybe Western activism will achieve Ms Moyo's aims, but I can't imagine it. The kind of nice people who put aid on the political map would be scared stiff that pulling the plug would produce pain long before it produced reform. I think it's more likely - and still a long-shot - that Ms Moyo's African contemporaries, and their children, will produce a social and political revolution in Africa. This book will have done excellent work if it produces the sort of moral and economic literacy which spurs that generational shift.

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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I overlook as a cheap gibe the obvious fact that the people keeping to the rules are the same people who make the rules. Rather, I am interested in the implicit idea that if something is legally permissible, it is morally permissible and cannot be reprehensible.

In other words, the law lays down for us the whole of our morality. Indeed, one often hears in defence of some bad conduct or other that "There's no law against it" (I can't positively swear that I've never used the argument myself), or "It's not against the law".

This, of course, is to confer immense significance to and, as a natural corollary of this, power on the state. It is the state, and the state alone, that decides what we may and may not do.

It is perfectly obvious that, in fact, the state is not in a position, either theoretically or in practice, to fine-tune our behaviour, and at one level no one seriously expects it to do so. In Britain, at any rate, state or public organisations prove quite unable to enforce even their own rules and regulations.

For example, almost everywhere the dropping of litter is prohibited. Yet Britain is by far the most littered country in Western Europe. Not long ago I saw a huge notice in the countryside warning people that there was a £2000 fine for dropping litter there - £2000! The ground below the notice was strewn with litter, as if in satirical commentary upon it. Similarly, one often sees young men on trains with their feet up on the seats, under notices telling them not to put their feet up on the seats, and that the carriage is under video surveillance.

The argument that "It's not against the law" is, of course, always used in a permissive way. No one says by way of justification of behaving with courtesy, sensitivity or refinement, "It's not against the law". A society in which the law, and the law alone, has the moral right to forbid anything is likely to end up in the odd position in which we now find ourselves: one of permissive authoritarianism.

We are harried and persecuted by regulations, while at the same time we behave with ever less self-control. We are photographed everywhere we go and in almost everything we do, but we set less and less store by decorum.

Apart from the fact that the politicians make up the rules by which they have to abide, they are precisely the same in their conduct as the rest of the population. In this sense, they are our true representatives.

Consider the following question: what percentage of first class passengers on our trains have paid for themselves, out of their own pockets, out of their own discretionary income? I cannot claim to have the figures to hand, but I should be surprised if it were more than, or even approached, ten per cent? This helps to explain how and why such first class fares are so monstrously expensive: you can fly halfway round the world for what it costs to go between two British cities, not necessarily the farthest apart, for the cost of a first class fare.

And of those who have not paid for themselves, what percentage travel
at taxpayers' expense? Of the residuum, what percentage travel at shareholders' expense? What percentage of business travellers has the express permission to do so by the majority shareholder or majority shareholders? How many of us, given the possibility of travelling first class at public or shareholders' expense, would or do refuse to do so?

A few years ago, a newspaper that at the time appeared to have limitless funds of money, sent me into various corners of the world to report on them, accompanied by a photographer. We were well-paid and were put up at good hotels by the newspaper. These were the conditions laid down in advance that we accepted. We could not claim that the newspaper was exploiting us or treating us badly.

Yet the photographer would ask everywhere, in taxis and restaurants, for blank receipts that he would later fill in at his leisure. This was outright criminal, of course, and I asked him to stop. He said that it was all right, I had no need to be worried, because a) he had never been caught at it, b) everyone else did it, and c) it harmed no one, since the newspaper was positively rolling in cash.

I knew that if I said that it was dishonest I would sound naïve or priggish or both, and that it would call forth a lecture about the exploitative nature of economic relations, the injustice of the vast incomes of the hereditary owners of the newspaper and so forth. I was well able to supply the lecture myself, for who in his entire life has never descended to such special pleading?

I muttered something about self-respect, but it was very unconvincing. Where is the regulation, the rule or the law that requires self-respect?

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.