Gazette readers have reacted furiously to Jack Straw’s provocative assertions about the future of legal aid, as my postbag attests.Lawyers dependent on the public purse ‘would be wise to reconsider expectations of earnings’, the lord chancellor rather loftily informed a conference at the London School of Economics.

Mr Straw’s dubious international comparisons beg many questions: can England and Wales really be compared with such a range of diverse legal systems? Why did he not point out that the legal aid budget as a percentage of total public spending has actually fallen in the UK?

In any case, such comparisons are, as they say, invidious. Britain spends a lot more on public healthcare than many developed countries. Does Mr Straw think we are spending too much on the NHS? One would imagine not.

Cash could be found to bolster the legal aid pot – of course it could – if one of government’s most senior figures chose to flex his fiscal muscles. Yet he chooses instead to market-test and de-skill, as if these mechanisms had not been exposed as the bogus panaceas they always were.