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One has to engage with someone like the Lord Chancellor on her own terms. Assuming her to be a dyed in the wool conservative, she should be receptive to arguments springing from a traditional conservative standpoint.

The Conservative philosophy is about shrinking the state, and making the individual citizen more responsible for his or her condition (or the other way round - immaterial for present purposes). What should worry a simple minded Conservative is that without a broadly accepted criminal justice system fires are being stoked which will threaten social order.

The old legal aid system was not arrived at as a result of some sense of benign 'outdoor relief' (although the fuzzy virtues that engenders may have been a component) but because in an increasingly pluralistic democracy it was accepted that for the criminal justice system as a whole to command respect, and acceptance, there had to be a mechanism to ensure, so far as was possible, that all defendants would be treated fairly, and equally.

These are noble aims, and not always achieved even in the best regulated societies, but without this aim the sense of 'them and us' is deepened. History, which most politicians forget (or never knew), affords many examples of what happens when society is fragmented and different outcomes follow because of differently placed defendants.

I don't think that it is putting it too far to say that if the Government does not ensure some measure of equality of arms in criminal proceedings (which necessarily means some system of financial support for representation - let's call it 'legal aid') the acceptability of criminal convictions will fall.

It may be going too far to opine that criminal convictions where the defendant was unrepresented, or where the defendant's representation was under-resourced (for whatever reason) are inherently unsafe, and therefore lead to a verdict which is questionable, are unconstitutional. But the suspicion will always be there.

As a traditional conservative, this worries me deeply: people should be encouraged to stand on their own two feet, and crippling them in the criminal process is neither fair nor Conservative.