I was a legal aid criminal defence solicitor with my own practice for more than 11 years, and in my view Stuart Kaufman fails to appreciate that this is the path he has chosen (see [2005] Gazette, 19 May, 16).


The reality is that legal aid practitioners chose to accept increasingly severe and persistent government interference allied with charity rates of pay as long ago as the early to mid-1990s. No real attempt was made to nip in the bud the machinations of government bureaucratic meddling and endless year-on-year pay freezes.


If legal aid solicitors had refused to be cowed by endless meddling in their work, then the roll-out of franchising, franchising mark 2, contracting, further bureaucratic psychosis and now the looming competitive tendering would never have taken place.


And where was the Law Society in all of this? Why was no lead taken by the Society in the early 1990s to protect the profession and its members? Why did some of its members have to cope with the endless bureaucratic psychosis allied with charity rates of pay that their privately funded brethren would laugh at?


The government will continue to treat legal aid solicitors precisely as it wishes, since the government, through the Legal Services Commission, knows that there will always be sufficient solicitors to do the work no matter how low the pay gets or how oppressive the bureaucracy becomes.


In life you teach people how to treat you, as the governments of various parties have discovered to their benefit. If Mr Kaufman does not wish to be paid less than a plumber or a glazier on emergency call-out why does he still wish to remain a criminal defence solicitor?


Andrew Butler, Lydney, Gloucestershire