A Dutch psychologist and criminologist, Chris Rutenfrans, once told me that, in his opinion, there was a single factor underlying much modern social pathology and psychic unease, namely a loss of the power of, or inclination to, self-control. It sounded plausible to me, for certainly it seems that many people feel, or at least claim to feel, that they have little control over what they do. Their behaviour controls them, rather than the other way round; they retain a core of the "real" them, a beautiful inner essence, that is betrayed by psychological forces beyond their control.

Why there should have been a loss of self-control is an interesting question. No doubt vested interest is part of the explanation. A man wants to go on doing what he knows perfectly well he should not do but nevertheless enjoys doing: so he claims to be in the grip of something that he cannot control.

But there is more, and worse: people are now persuaded that self-control is a kind of cultural perversion, at best an absurdity and at worst a source of deep pathology, and that in order to be true to oneself one must express oneself - emotions and desires - as and when the mood takes one. For "Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires".

One small manifestation of this loss of self-control, that is now a culture-wide phenomenon, is on display at Wimbledon. Almost every time a photograph appears in the newspaper of the young British tennis player, Andrew Murray, he appears to be assaulting an invisible enemy. His free fist is clenched, his mouth in wide open as if uttering a snarling war-cry, and altogether he looks ready to attack any moving thing that comes within range. It is very ugly.

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.

The grass is always greener on the other side, and other people's conversations are always more interesting than my own. Moreover, my eyes on trains are invariably drawn from what I am reading myself to what other people are reading. I have no idea whether I am unique in this, or whether everyone else is exactly the same.

The other day I happened to see a fellow-passenger reading an article in a newspaper that I had missed, about the way in which police in Britain have now started searching white people against whom they have no suspicions whatever, simply to balance the racial proportions of people searched in their efforts to prevent terrorism.

I do not know whether the story is true, but as the Americans say, "it listens": it is perfectly plausible or even likely, because of our obsession with targets and quotas. I admit that I am highly sceptical about how much of the activity carried out in the name of anti-terrorism is genuinely and necessarily connected with that end, but racial quotas can only weaken that connection further.

Arriving at the station where, according to the announcement, "this train" does not merely stop, but "terminates", I took a taxi. In this vehicle were the usual warnings deemed necessary in taxis all over the British provinces about the amount one would have to pay if one vomited in it, how one ought to behave well because one was being recorded on camera, etc. And if these warnings were not enough, there were two police notices:

Anyone who verbally abuses or assaults the driver of this Taxi will be reported to the police and prosecuted.

Please don't be offended if your driver asks for payment before you start your journey.

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.

Wales gave me my most satisfying moment in forty years of university teaching. It was at Stanford, we were studying immigration and ethnicity in America and a student called Jenkins and myself had agreed to cover the Welsh angle. The story of the Welsh in America is that they were extremely successful and integrated immediately so that that the hyphenated Welsh-American category was never used and there were no Welsh ghettoes (unlike even the Cornish). This led those back home who sought to establish a Welsh identity overseas to despair of North America and in 1868 they hired a ship to go to Patagonia where integration might be less tempting.

Anyway, we were talking about this sort of stuff when one of the students interrupted. "Excuse me", he said, "I can't relate to this at all. Where is Welshland? What sort of surnames do these people have?"

I thought I was on to something here and replied, "Typical Welsh surnames include Thomas, Lewis, Evans, Davies, Powell . . ." (I was enjoying seeing the jaws drop) " . . . and the most common surname in Wales is . . . . Jones".

There was a satisfying consternation followed by the lad who asked the original question saying, "Those are American names". To which I could only say, "I rest my case".

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.

A fine spring morning in East Lancashire. Pointed the car the other way - northwards. Off into limitless hills, distant horizons, empty roads, acres of blazing yellow gorse - an alternative Britain. Beyond Glasgow, through the genteel Highland world of Loch Lomond and into the menacing vastness of Glencoe. Climbed Ben Nevis, the last hour in calf-numbing snow. Had that definitive Scottish moment when a world consisting entirely of mist changes to a world of a dozen glimmering waters and a score of mountains and then back again to mist. Crossed the Skye Bridge for the first time and the flat-calm Minch. Stood alone among the ancient stones of Callanish under the merciless Hebridean sun. Explored a Broch (an iron-age castle). Bought a tweed cap. Went fishing and caught thirty trout and two salmon (well, my wife caught the salmon). Continued west, to the very edge of Europe at Gallan Head and walked by the crashing waves under the scudding Atlantic clouds.

Oh, the joys of the weak currency and the journey away from Calais. And - yes - we were very lucky with the weather. Saw ptarmigan and snow buntings, sea eagles and golden eagles and a snowy owl, all without trying. Ate venison and haggis and more kinds of fish than you could shake a fork at. Drank some whisky. Had conversations with people who had time for conversations and who seemed to enjoy conversing. Confined my reading to Scottish authors and most enjoyed Finlay J. MacDonald, Crowdy and Cream: Memoirs of a Hebridean Childhood.

So take my tip if you can and set off north right away and catch Scotland with long days, but without tourists or midgies. And don't knock Scotland while I'm around, pal! F***ing magnificent!

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.

There are two myths about the Marquis de Sade, and one truth. The two myths are, on the one hand, that of the existential hero described by Simone de Beauvoir in "Faut-il brûler Sade?", and on the other, that of the Enlightenment satirist who was fully aware of the repugnancy of his fictions, and who expected his reader to be so, too - a myth peddled by his latter-day moralistic apologists.

The one truth, however, is that de Sade was a nasty trifler whose unreadable, obsessive, writings attract those weak souls who are too timid to do anything more than read about the depravities to which they are furtively drawn.

Unsurprisingly, then, de Sade seems to have appealed to the suicidal fantasist, Yukio Mishima, who of course eventually did have the guts (probably a tactless metaphor, but let it stand) to act out his fantasies, and whose Madame de Sade is little more than a thin dramatisation of the analysis in de Beauvoir's essay, first published in Les temps modernes of 1951 and 1952.

This production is a perfect case of titillation. The Donmar announces that its run at The Wyndham is to include a play exploring the sexual deviancy of the Marquis de Sade. It begs the question, how could this be stageable? Anticipation gathers when it is revealed that Rosamund Pike and Judi Dench are to take the leading roles - faces more at home in Bond movies and period pieces than depictions of sexual depravity (though that scene of M running a bath in Quantum of Solace is pretty near the knuckle).

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.

It is hard to claim that we have a meritocracy when it comes to our elected representatives in Westminster. Most voters cast their vote on Party lines. This is perfectly rational as they judge that which Government is running the country is more important then the personal qualities of their local MP. They might not think much of their local MP, or even know who it is, but will be aware of who the Prime Minister is and the main alternative and regard it as an important
choice. They will understand that the pertinent choice so far as how
their lives will be affected concerns the collection of policies on offer from the Conservatives and from Labour.

To take an example of relevance to me in west London. Some of the Labour MPs and candidates will pledge to oppose a third runway at Heathrow. But it would still be no use electing them as they would still be contributing to the return of a Labour Government pledged to go ahead with it.

I don't wish to exaggerate the point. There is considerable variation in swing in different constituencies. But these are as likely to be explained by factors such as demographic change and the efficiency of Party organisation in mobilising their vote as of the personal following of the MP.

So if the electorate tend not to see their priority being to vote out dud MPs regardless of Party, what other safeguards exist? It's the selectorate, the local Party members. The system works reasonably well when a candidate is first chosen. There is normally plenty of competition. The process is taken quite seriously. Lots of time considering criteria, wading through piles of CVs of potential candidates most of whom will already have gone through extensive vetting by the Party HQ. Naturally the greater the prospect of eventual success the greater the competition.

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.

This is an attractive recipe for a book on African development. It comes from a clever and presumably successful banker, so that's good. What's more, she's a young, black, female member of the African diaspora and good-looking with it. She briskly proposes a market-orientated alternative to the aid she says has done little or nothing - perhaps worse - for her continent.

Let's start with her much-vaunted demolition job.

Aid has become a cultural commodity

Aid has helped make the poor poorer, and growth slower.

of forty-eight sub-Saharan African countries, over 50 per cent hold regular democratic elections that can be deemed free and fair.

But Ms Moyo insists aid seldom helped and often hindered these slivers of hope.

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.

The most senior nurse of a psychiatric hospital, a man universally liked and respected, was once asked at his retirement party how he, a poor Irish immigrant with little formal education on arrival in the country, had advanced so far in the profession. He replied:

I never filled in any travel expenses.

What interests me most about the current defence that the politicians put up, when it is revealed that they have gone to the taxpayer for the goldfish food with which they feed the goldfish in their second homes, is that it is "within the rules". This tells us a lot about our current notions of morality.

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.

In brief
This book is a clear and comprehensive exposition - the most comprehensive yet - of the case which is being made to support the thesis that Britain and other Anglosphere countries ought to be far more equal. The case is that inequality actually creates misery and does so on a scale which morally requires us to take political action.

If the case were proven, it would indeed be morally compelling. It is being taken as proven by the likes of Phillip Blond and John Cruddas and is now entrenched as the underpinning of the Government's attempt to address inequality in a systematic way.

However, one must be quite selective of the actual data to get to the result sought by the egalitarians.

The book and its place in the argument
You might expect this book to make modishly post-materialist remarks, and you would be right. It does bring some new angles to the old idea that Anglosphere countries ought to become more equal. The arguments here are, by the way, mostly about the rich world. There is next to nothing about the role of inequality in "poor" countries. If you fancy a brief introduction to its thesis, you might try the Guardian's rather pedestrian and very supportive review. John Kay in the FT was friendly but much more sceptical and on lines similar to those I develop below.

Meantime it is quite possible that the recession has produced some of the effects the authors seek: the financial meltdown may have clobbered the top 20 percent of Western countries even more than the bottom 20.

The Spirit Level doesn't prove a very strong connection between inequality and the social evils it is worried about. Insofar as there is evidence of a connection, the book doesn't prove it to be causal rather than a matter of correlation. And the authors totally ignore such benign correlations as those between unequal societies and theatre, research excellence and excitement.

Finally, to close this summary of some of the arguments, you can see the whole thing seriously undermined by evidence cited on my own website. Amongst others I cite is The Economist's own accounts of some of the evidence, to which has recently been added its sceptical review of the approach of the gloomy publicists of the Mental Health Foundation to their own rather cheering evidence about British unhappiness.

The Economist points to OECD evidence which shows that UK anti-depressant use was average amongst OECD countries in 2000 and is now rising, but not so fast as it is in the Scandinavian countries admired by The Spirit Level, some of which have always consumed more of these drugs than the wicked old UK. Now all of them do.

The old-new inequality argument
The Spirit Level is a repetition of a modern and increasingly familiar argument that the Big Thing about inequality is the emotional and psychological impact of people's perception of the differences between society's stratas. For an interesting, sympathetic and more idiosyncratic account of this inner thesis about status stress, try John Carey's Sunday Times review. I am cynical about this part of the book's argument. I think it is adopted because it is a line which cannot be proved either way. That helps when there is no other evidence that inequality is a problem.

My core argument against The Spirit Level (beyond its mangling of data) is that it won't see that the kind of society which tolerates inequality is brutal in lots of other ways too as a matter of correlation not cause. And if that's how we like it, then that's our choice. The Spirit Level says there is poll data which insists large majorities in the UK and US believe inequality is a bad thing. That's all very well, but they have voted for it for years and Labour did better only once it ceased to assert that it wanted to be oppressively egalitarian.

Three quite new inequality arguments
The book highlights various new or newish developments in the equality debate and they are nicely counter-intuitive. If the cases could be made to stand up, we'd have a book of serious note.

Here they are.

Argument #1. Inequality is a predictor of a much wider range of social ills than hitherto supposed. That's to say: inequality causes damage of widely divergent sorts. In other words, we could cure masses of problems by reducing inequality. Key quote:

……among the rich developed countries and among the fifty states of the United States, …. most of the important health and social problems of the rich world are more common in more unequal societies.

The problems in rich societies are not caused by the society not being rich enough (or even by being too rich) but by the scale of material differences between people within each society being too big. What matters is where we stand in relation to others in our own society.

…. These differences [between more or less equal societies] are not differences between high- and low-risk groups within populations which might apply to only a small proportion of the population, or just to the poor. Rather, they are difference between the prevalence of different problems which apply to whole populations.

Unpicking the book
The book is a fairly standard diatribe against affluence, in the sense that it remarks that over a certain quite low level of development, social improvements and reported well-being tail off. One can certainly make that case, though it is both superficially reinforced and profoundly confounded by the evidence (included in some graphs in the book) that the first massive improvements in welfare (for example, life expectancy) take place at very low levels of development in some countries. In others, they don't. But I'd say that few people would argue that they want to stay quite poor because they believe that getting quite rich won't add much to their longevity.

What's more, to return to the rich world, in some egalitarian affluent societies (eg, Denmark) life expectancy is lowish and similar to that in the very unequal USA, whilst life expectancy is highish in both the egalitarian Sweden and the unequal Australia.

This is the moment to point out that one can pick important holes in very many of the graphs on which the book is proudly and loudly based. In case after case, the graphs reveal important exceptions to the rule being promulgated.

Some of these positively leap out of the graphs. You are more likely to be an overweight teenager in egalitarian Spain or Greece than in the unequal UK. You are more likely to be a fat adult in egalitarian Finland, Germany or Ireland than in unequal Italy.

Weirdly, Portugal is wildly unequal but it is quite often much nicer than other similarly unequal societies (though it sometimes improbably joins the Anglosphere in nastiness). By the way, many other fascinating anomalies in the book's thesis receive scant attention from the authors.

These exceptions to the authors' rules are not marginal or a matter of outliers. Very often within a narrow band of inequality, the authors find a wide range in bad outcomes. Similarly, in other cases within a wide band of inequality, they often find a small range in bad outcomes.

What's more, whilst the authors can often say that in general unequal countries produce bad effects, the culprits which make the various cases vary considerably. The authors' listed countries are of course fixed in their relative inequality. But their position in the various dysfunction charts vary quite a lot.

America's inner inqualities
This is perhaps the moment to note that the book looks at evidence about equality differences between US states and finds they correlate closely with social failure. I am not convinced by this argument. Without anything clever-clogs about inequality I can easily get why egalitarian Vermont, New Hampshire and Minnesota are very different to (and more socially successful than) unequal Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama or even unequal Texas and Arizona. In America race and immigration are important factors, as indeed is a taste for non-interference. Besides I rather spitefully love the way unequal New York and Connecticut do quite well socially. What's more, and as I have noted elsewhere, there is pretty good evidence that rich Americans do much better than poor ones in mental health terms and the only dent in the case comes from rich women whose travails are well-known from every American movie, novel or documentary you ever saw. (This may mean that women can't handle inequality, though men can.)

Inequality and social immobility
One argument in the book is quite tough to refute. This is that social mobility - once a badge of the Anglosphere - does indeed seem to have departed these shores and pitched up in Scandinavia instead. On the book’s argument, the Anglosphere is socially static because it is unequal. There may be something in that in the sense that to go from the bottom to the top of Anglosphere societies is a longer haul than to make the same journey in Scandinavia. However it is also likely that in the Anglosphere societies there is less social pressure to be educated in the way required to be useful to modern societies. This second argument is about correlations with inequality, not about inequality imposing itself as a cause. By the way, the OECD says that inequality in some countries is importantly to do with their allowing an "underclass" to develop.

This might imply (though not necessarily) that there being an unusual proportion of rich people might have less to do with any problems related to their being rich than there being a desperate and perhaps unusually large sink of poor people.

Of course, any bad news about the West is blindingly obvious to all right-thinking people. In that narrative, the USA is much more unequal than most western societies and it is widely believed that it is socially a complete basket case. The UK, its poodle, limps along in its wake, very unequal and quite troubled. Actually, the OECD says the UK has - like Greece and Mexico - been getting slightly less unequal since about 2000.

More nit-picking
Our authors find that however ghastly the UK is, your Brit's chances of being the victim of homicide are lower than many others' including the Frenchman's or the Italian's. But the British child will apparently experience much more conflict than most.

More generally, the UN (which these authors love) assesses your British child's chances of wellbeing as the lowest of all rich children, and by miles. However, and here is another case of these authors not doing their readers the favour of explaining their own glaring inconsistencies, the same UN says that the UK, Australia, Canada and the USA (the Anglosphere, unequal, dysfunctional and all that) are nonetheless comfortable world leaders in the "Human Development Index" and right up there (in the UK's case a little ahead) of super-virtuous Sweden. The UN says the UK even has a lower ecological footprint than super-green Sweden, so there.

Some RDN arguments
Much of the data in this book is drawn from material I have criticised at length elsewhere, so I won't trouble you with all that again here. I refer especially to well-being and mental health data, in which Lord (Richard) Layard, Oliver James, and the authors under present review all seem to delight in being highly selective.

It may be worth developing slightly different arguments here.

There maybe something to the inequality argument
The Spirit Level argues that Western societies need more equality and that they need that even more than they need to address their average or national income, or even their levels of poverty. The book may make an impact because some charming and unworldly people may not have quite clocked the elementary fact that the Anglosphere has many merits but it is not as nice as Scandinavia or the northern Continent or the Mediterranean Littoral (in more or less that order). We can dispute that the Anglosphere is all that awful, but it may be as well to suggest that it is in fact quite deliberately a little awful. It is part of the brisk brutality of the Anglosphere that it relishes success and failure.

It should be no surprise that there is a link between inequality and various social ills. They are alike in being part of the fewer-holds-barred scene. I am not at all sure that inequality produces unpleasantness but I do accept that it has correlations with it. I accept such things as part of the culture which has given me Mick Jagger and Tom Stoppard, and Hollywood and Google, let alone Purcell and Shakespeare. Put it this way: I am neither Calvinist nor Catholic by temperament. But I do try to be a Cavalier rather than a Roundhead. (Since that takes courage, I often fail.)

I do see that we have to have an argument about equality. But it is not remotely a done deal that the egalitarians will win it. Books like The Spirit Level will have their work cut out when confronted with the bloody-mindedness of the Brit.

Let's try and be nicer
I would not much mind if this society decided that it wanted to be more Scandinavian. This is a little circular. If it was democratically decided that England would be happier if it were more socialist, or more egalitarian at any rate, then I would have to accept that there was a powerful utilitarian argument for going in that direction. I am a right-winger but not because I think it is absolutely important as a matter of principle that people not build socialist societies.

I am a right-winger partly because it makes me happy to think that socialism would not work for the British (or the English anyway), and partly because I do actually believe that it is good for the British (or the English anyway) to explore a non-Scandinavian way of life. I feel that someone ought to, as a matter of variety. Insofar as this society is dysfunctional, I do not have much faith that making it more equal would sort out the problem.

A big chunk of my belief here is to do with my assessment of what British people are like and what they want. And a lot of that has to do with what I would like them to be like. They could prove me wrong and break no rule or principle as they did so. I don't think the Danes or Finns are wrong about life just because they find being more socialist than us suits them.

And we could try egalitarianism too
Oddly, the argument that more equality might not make much difference to our social dysfunction (such as it is) doesn't block the case that we should be more egalitarian. There might be some merit in being more egalitarian even if being so wouldn't make the kind of differences that Wilkinson and Pickett suppose. It's obvious that we'd all be happier if the poor were richer.

But I am also open to the idea that both the rich and the poor might benefit from the rich being less rich. There may be something socially or humanly redemptive or improving in egalitarianism simply and rather in the terms adumbrated by this books' authors in some of their pages. I don't even mind the inner core of their case: that people think and find that equality matters in and of itself. I don't really think it's true, but the next generation may experiment in that direction and they may even make the experiment work. In short, they could prove me wrong.

I do think that this core argument sits ill with the wider arguments in the book. I have more sympathy with the book's argument that inequality upsets people than with the book's wider arguments that inequality causes lots of other miseries.

For my part, I will continue to argue that egalitarianism may not be a virtue in itself. I will argue that those who let inequality get them down ought to address their own insecurities rather than society's inequities. And I will continue to argue that the egalitarians are barking up the wrong tree when they say inequality causes all the misery in the world.

A modest underclass proposal
One of the reasons I disagree with this sort of book is that I think we need to invest heavily in the children at the very bottom of our society. I don't mind if we invest less (and exhort or lead more) elsewhere.

I can also rescue my reputation as a right-winger by saying that I am not worried by the inequality the very disadvantaged children experience, but by the absolute rigidity of the awfulness of the circumstances in which they find themselves. I don't think that has much to do with their poverty or their distance from the top of society. Their parents are not much poorer than their neighbours who are doing much better. I doubt these kids' income is the cause of their being stuck, often amongst loving people who are useless to them but who have no habit of work.

I am not nearly so worried by the many people in our society who choose to be intellectually idle and ignorant and fat and violent and drunk but are usually in work of some kind. Most of those people may be shifted into a more interesting condition by changing fashions and by generational change. But the young at the very bottom of society seem to be in a much worse condition of stasis which we have to do something about.

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.

It is curious how, when it comes to rape, the liberal press, and presumably liberals themselves, suddenly appreciate the value of punishment. They do not say of rape that we must understand the causes of rape before we punish it; that we must understand how men develop into rapists before we lock them away, preferably for a long time; that prison does not work. It is as if, when speaking of rape, it suddenly becomes time to put away childish things, and (to change the metaphor slightly) to talk the only kind of language that rapists understand.

They quiver with outrage when they learn that the clear-up rate for rape cases is only 6.5 per cent, though this in fact is very similar to the clear-up rate of all crimes. They are appalled at cases where rapists are left free to commit more of their crimes because of police and Crown Prosecution Service incompetence, which is itself the natural result of the policy of successive governments. But it is important for their self-respect as liberals that their outrage should not be
generalised, that they should not let it spill over into consideration of other categories of crime, where the same bureaucratic levity and frivolity is likewise demonstrated. For, as every decent person knows, there are far too many prisoners in this country already, and prison does not work.

This is Britain in the spring of 2009. We are not some UN-designated failed state. We have a criminal justice system that works reasonably effectively for pretty much everyone else.

The last time I looked up the figures, the official clear-up rate for domestic burglaries was about one in 12. (Even this is an overestimate, because of unreported burglaries, and because of cases "taken into consideration", a category ripe for statistical manipulation in favour of the police).

The imprisonment rate of convicted burglars was about one in 13. This means that one in 156 domestic burglaries ended in a prison sentence. The average prison sentence is 6 months (which means prisoners actually serve 3 months); let us, for the sake of argument, assume that convicted burglars get, on average, double the average prison sentence, that is to say 12 months, of which they serve 6 months, or 180 days.

Thus, the average cost to a burglar of a domestic burglary is approximately 1 day in prison. The question to be asked, then, is not why there are so many burglaries, but so few. My point at the moment, however, is that the criminal justice system can hardly be said to serve the burgled community very well, though it serves the burgling community very well.

The Guardian for the same date carried a small news item about the widower of Jane Goody, Jack Tweed, who was sentenced to prison for
having assaulted a taxi driver. I reproduce it in full:

Jack Tweed, husband of Jane Goody, who died of cancer last month, was sentenced to 12 weeks in jail yesterday for an assault on a taxi driver after a drinking binge in May last year. Tweed, 21, was found guilty at Epping magistrates' court last month. The court heard how he grabbed taxi driver Stephen Wilkins round the throat and threatened to stab him while he was driving. The 21-year-old also attempted to apply the handbrake while the car was moving, the court heard. It was the second time in six months that Tweed had been found guilty of assault.

It cannot be said, either, that what he did was the kind of thing that anyone might do on the spur of the moment, from understandably overwhelming passion. Nor, I think, is it very likely that the taxi driver considered the six (not twelve) weeks that Tweed would spend in prison sufficient recompense for what he, Tweed, had done, or for what he had made the taxi driver suffer. As for the alcohol, it should not be regarded as in the slightest a mitigating circumstance, rather the reverse.

The driver and other drivers like him could hardly conclude from the sentence passed on Tweed that the state was deeply concerned for their safety or well-being. It is unlikely, also, that The Guardian, which passed no comment on the sentence, was deeply concerned either: for are not taxi-drivers as a whole the kind of people who read the Daily Mail and frequently express the most reactionary ideas? They are certainly not a designated oppressed group, and therefore it is not of any great importance that crimes against them are inadequately repressed and thereby prevented.

Nevertheless, the logic of pursuing and severely repressing crimes such as that committed by Tweed is exactly the same as that of pursuing and severely repressing rapists.

If anyone were to write that he thought that rapists should not be locked up because they have had a difficult childhood, have psychological problems and aberrant personalities, including a tendency to take drugs and too much alcohol, and because prison does not work as evidenced by the fact that they often
commit the same sorts of crimes on release, he would be (rightly) regarded as a moral idiot. Yet the very same arguments are trotted out, with every appearance of convincing the people who trot them out of their own moral superiority over those who do not believe them, with regard to the kinds of crimes that make the lives of many old people in this country (to take only one example) a torment.

This is moral frivolity of a very high – or low – order. And it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that it has been predominant in this country for decades.

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.

In The Economist of 21 February 2009, in an article entitled "The Spiral of Ignorance", "Bagehot" identified as one of the features of our current economic discontents the fact that "nobody seems to know what he is talking about". Events have moved with a rapidity and force which has taken commentators by surprise, so that "the financial crisis has stretched and befogged even most economists". The political implications of this are alarming:

The public seems to appreciate that the crunch involves both foreign and domestic forces. But to most people the rest is a mystery. Along with the high anxiety, this uncertainty helps to explain the volatile political impact of the downturn: large numbers of people seem to be amenable to whatever explanation seems freshly plausible.

It is perhaps less important to put one's finger on exactly when the language of economics became remorselessly mathematical than to comprehend the implications of that shift. At any rate, it seems to have happened towards the end of the twentieth century, because until the early decades of that century economists spoke to the general reader in language which required no special expertise to be understood (even if, of course, some of the concepts were forbiddingly counter-intuitive).

Hume's essays on economic subjects are not written in a language different from his other essays (and independent-minded economists today can still be found who will insist that all that their colleagues have managed to do since the mid eighteenth century is to add some empirical data to Hume's general insights). Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is, in eighteenth-century language, a work of polite literature which addressed itself to the literati of its time, not to any specialist group, and which comprised within its intellectual scope the most urgent questions of international politics, as well as economic theory narrowly construed.

Or, given that his name is enjoying a renewed prominence in the present revaluation of all economic values, one might consider Keynes, whose brilliant attack on the vindictiveness and short-sightedness of the Treaty of Versailles, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, was first published exactly ninety years ago.

The Economic Consequences of the Peace is an exciting book to read at any time, but it is particularly exciting to read it today because of the clear evidence it supplies that perceptive and cogent economic expositions can be written by human beings as well as (perhaps that should read "rather than") mathematical adepts. (Only those who have experienced it know how chilling it can be at a college party to hear your hostess say "Now, come and meet the mathematicians.")

Keynes's humanity was all too evident during the Paris Peace Conference, when apparently he conducted an affair with one of the German delegates. But it is also clear in the text of The Economic Consequences of the Peace, which is studded with quotations from Hardy and Shelley, and which contains no number rounded down to less than the nearest million. And just as Keynes was too wise to place any faith in the bewitchments of a spurious numerical exactness, so he was too shrewd to forego the more substantial bewitchments of language.

Keynes's portraits of the victorious leaders, the so-called Council of Four - Clemenceau, the vindictive French peasant; Lloyd George, the Welsh charlatan; Woodrow Wilson, the foolish idealist; Orlando, most witheringly treated in virtue of being hardly mentioned at all - are all wonderful examples of mordant, pitiless satire.

But they are not examples of literary art for its own sake. They are related to, and engage our sympathies on behalf of, a brilliant synopsis of the economic life of the nineteenth century, and how it fed into the dreadful errors of 1919. The keynote of Keynes's exposition is not some recondite mathematical proposition, but rather the interaction between a perennial element of human nature and unprecedented economic circumstances:

The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind. Very few of us realize with conviction the intensely unusual, unstable, complicated, unreliable, temporary nature of the economic organization by which Western Europe has lived for the last half century.

he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous, and avoidable.

by setting in motion those forces of instruction and imagination which change opinion. The assertion of truth, the unveiling of illusion, the dissipation of hate, the enlargement and instruction of men's hearts and minds, must be the means.

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

In the fifty years since he burst onto the world stage during the Cuban Revolution, Ernesto "Che" Guevara has become an iconic global figure. His face graces millions of T-shirts, it looks down from marketing posters and billboards.

There is a highly commercial Che Guevara Store, with Che Guevara T-Shirts and Merchandise - "All Che Guevara merchandise is officially licensed". There are Che cafes and restaurants, and even Che Clubs as far apart as Dallas and St. Petersburg. He has become, in short, the epitome of commercialised radical chic. It came as a pleasant surprise, therefore, that Steven Soderbergh's new two-part epic Che is not a shallow and meretricious attempt to cash in on the glamorous myth. There is no sensationalism, no romance, no moralizing and little action. As far as I can see no obvious liberties are taken with the facts.

Yet there is ambivalence, too: confronted by the need to maintain discipline, he remarks that "we execute, we don't murder", a statement which the film delivers neither sententiously, nor archly but in a matter-of-fact tone.

By the time we reach Part II, moreover, Che has had to compromise some of his ideals, when he welcomes a sixteen-year old Bolivian boy fighter, having sent two Cuban youths of the same age back to school in Part I. All this is depicted against the inexorable decline of the hero's health, which starts with a perpetual and rather pathetic sniffling in Part I, and ends with the disabling asthmatic attacks which laid him low for much of the Bolivian campaign. Benicio del Toro gets this sense of fragility and inner strength across in a performance which must have taken a lot out of him.

Some things are swept under the carpet. Nothing is made of the notorious - and continuing - homophobia of the Cuban Revolution: the nearest we get is a brief moment in Part I when those who opt out of the column are dismissed as "faggots". One wonders how that went down in the Café Che's of the Bay area.

An unfortunate omission is the Fidel Castro-Che relationship, which merely ticks over in Part I and is not explored once victory was won. A pity, because there has been plenty of informed discussion about whether Che's move to Bolivia was driven in part by disillusionment with the peacetime realities of building a "just" society in Cuba after Batista had been driven out. There also seems to have been a strategic disagreement similar to that between Stalin and Trosky, with Fidel pleading in favour of "socialism in one country", for the moment at least, while Che believed that the revolution should be exported to the rest of Latin America, and indeed around the world.

In this context, the greatest failure of the film is to provide the necessary context. The director seems to presuppose that viewers will be familiar with Che's Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War and his Bolivian Diary, which have been republished to co-incide with the release of the film.

In Part I, Soderbergh can just about get away with this because most of us vaguely know about Castro and Batista. In Part II, however, the viewer is simply pitched into the South American jungle with virtually no indication of what Che was trying to achieve beyond some nebulous "revolution" or "justice". We need to know that he went to Bolivia, the "Switzerland of South America" because it bordered on so many other countries in the region and was thus the ideal base from which to spread the revolution. We should be told that Regis Debray, who briefly bumbles onto the set, was crucial to Che's plans for globalising the struggle and bringing it back to Europe with him. His distress on hearing of Debray's arrest, which is palpable in the Bolivian Diary, otherwise makes no sense.

Some background is also essential to understanding why Part II ends, unlike the first part, with Che's ignominious capture and execution - or is it murder (?) - by the Bolivian army. Soderbergh does bring out the innate distrust of the peasantry, and their general dislike of "foreigners", which the Argentine Che very much was. But the broader reasons for his failure remain obscure. Che proved unable to build the hoped-for coalition with disaffected elements within the country. Here the film's handling of the sceptical communist leader Monje is no help at all: the viewer has to infer what is happening from a few muffled exchanges in which Monje warns that he will expel party faithful who join Che.

Moreover, Bolivia was not Cuba: there Che faced not a straightforward Batista-style dictatorship, but an elected government which, for all its faults, had much deeper roots tan the revolutionaries trying to bring it down. Until Che appeared, bringing the Americans in his wake, the hated "yankees" were not much in evidence.

In Cuba on the other hand, as even the briefest glance at the pre-revolutionary Havana skyline reveals, the US was oppressively ubiquitous. But perhaps Soderbergh himself senses this. Very near the end of Part II, the officer interrogating Che asks "what made you think you would succeed"? After some two and a half hours, it is a question to which his film had still not provided an answer.

Dr Brendan Simms is Professor 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.

A remark by the last head of MI6 is the occasion for this piece, although the cause is the genuine problem posed by how an historian should tackle the recent past.

The occasion, post-prandial discussion around a large table. Our guest, asked (not by me) his opinion of Tony Blair, remarks that he thought highly of him and is convinced that history will do the same. I cannot help muttering, but only so that my neighbours heard, that I hadn't made my mind up yet.

Facetious, of course, but also capturing the problem for the historian of making judgments, especially about the recent past. Possibly especially is the wrong word as every judgment poses problems whether of Caligula or Saddam Hussein. One key problem is ahistoricism or applying, inappropriately, the standards of another age. Yet, to use the standards of contemporaries will only take us so far. The issue of the Home Secretary's allowances is a case in point. Clearly she will not be labelled a crook at the end of the enquiry. At most, there will probably be a conclusion of inappropriate behaviour largely due to a lack of clarity in the guidelines.

However, to record the episode in that light is inadequate, first because such a conclusion does not capture the impression made on contemporaries and, secondly, because the episode poses serious questions for historians (and others) about the character of government, and quality of governance, in Britain, and indeed Europe, in the 2000s.

First issue, the impression made on contemporaries. The Home Secretary, her supporters, the government, and Parliament, may all be unaware or oblivious, but to much of the country, her conduct seems fundamentally crooked. Crooked because it is self-serving, crooked because it involves her family, crooked because the sum involved is large, crooked because she is responsible for an important section of public order, and crooked because she has not stood down.

Are these responses enough for an historian to call her a crook?

But will anyone care then? As another historian with whom I discussed the issue pointed out, "Who now cares whether Nixon was a crook?". So, leaving the matter to historians is receiving a pass, indeed a "get out of jail free" card.

Two additional points deserve attention. First, the problems of the Labour élite can be related to a more general crisis in European governance, with corrupt, self-referring and self-serving governments, most prominently that of the European Union, failing to do much more than maintain sclerotic systems. The political hazard can be seen with the rise of critical populist movements, many on the ideological fringes. Thus, a dangerous dichotomy is created, with each side employing the other to justify its own position and goals.

Britain had been happily largely free from this process, in part because the representative system does not reward minority parties and in part because the major parties have largely avoided moving to the extremes, although Labour did so in the 1980s. This achievement, however, is being compromised in a more general crisis of governance in which the governmental process risks being discredited.

Secondly, we are by no means yet in a situation where Britain displays the worse type of political and governmental practice seen for example in Romania, Bulgaria or Italy, but episodes such as the Home Secretary's allowances are not encouraging. They may also serve future historians to emphasise a lack of national exceptionalism that is far from encouraging.

Jeremy Black is Professor of History, University of Exeter. He is the author - amongst much else - of The Slave Trade (2007), A Short History of Britain (2007), The Holocaust (2008), The Curse of History (2008), What If?: Counterfactualism and the Problem of History (2008) and War Since 1990.

So here goes with a first for the list.
Source: a former member of the Northern Rock Board.

Rumour: The government was told the January before the crash that Northern Rock was in serious difficulties and might need help. Brown's political advisors, however, decided to do nothing because they thought that the resulting crisis would provide him with an opportunity to display leadership.

Verdict: Difficult to see how the source could gauge the reason for the response. Interest for the historian is what the crisis tells us about the degree to which ministers and their political advisors are distrusted, and assumed to be motivated primarily by a determination to look good. Such rumours are likely to gather pace, but it will be difficult to find archival sources to substantiate or contest them.

Jeremy Black is Professor of History, University of Exeter. He is the author - amongst much else - of The Slave Trade (2007), A Short History of Britain (2007), The Holocaust (2008), The Curse of History (2008), What If?: Counterfactualism and the Problem of History (2008) and War Since 1990.

There would also be far less detrimental consequences for the real economy than those caused by possible cuts in many areas of public expenditure, for example defence procurement. Instead of such cuts, there has been a major rise in expenditure on the BBC, much of it organisational, for example the expensive process of subsidising staff to move to Salford.

The failure to introduce cuts in the licence fee raises the question of why the government should neglect an obvious opportunity to reduce financial strain, one moreover that would increase the sense that cuts and hardship are widespread and, therefore, a collective experience. The obvious answer is that the government is rewarding a key constituency and trying to ensure support. This could be dismissed as cynicism was there not a troubling pattern of co-operation between Labour and BBC to the political advantage of the former and the institutional convenience of the latter. This is an issue for the Conservatives, whether in opposition or in government. The role of the BBC needs to be addressed and due impartiality required and ensured.

Jeremy Black is Professor of History, University of Exeter, and the author of War Since 1990.