The English used to pride themselves on their fairness: what wasn’t fair wasn’t cricket. Maybe other people didn’t take them at their own estimate, but it is now beyond dispute that substantial numbers of Britons are completely without any sense of fairness or justice. For them, the law is merely one of the instruments with which they wage the perpetual war of each against all.

The police and the criminal justice system well know this aspect of modern English life and have even managed to turn it to their advantage. For an example, look at a recent case in which I was due to give evidence as a doctor.

Mr A assaulted Mr B, who hitherto was his best friend, or should I say mate. (I have seen many a nose broken by a best mate.) Both were, as usual, under the influence of alcohol and other mind, or at least behaviour -altering, substances. Mr B was bloodily injured and called the police.

By the time they arrived, Mr A had left the scene. The police took a statement from Mr B, and then, about a week later, arrested Mr A. Because of what is known in the trade as “previous”, or sometimes as “form”, the magistrates remanded Mr A into custody.

On the day of the trial Mr B did not turn up to give evidence — unlike me. There was a vague rumour that he wanted to withdraw his complaint. The trial was adjourned for two weeks, but on the second occasion Mr B still did not turn up — again unlike me and unlike a different legal team for both the prosecution and defence. The question arose whether he should be summonsed. In the meantime Mr A escaped from custody. A week later he was rearrested and tried for his escape.

Meanwhile, the original charges will not go ahead because Mr B has made it clear that he will not testify. Whether Mr A has successfully intimidated Mr B, or whether Mr B has thought better of it, and does not wish to be known on his housing estate as a grass, cannot be known.

The result of the expenditure of thousands, probably scores of thousands, on this case — readers might be relieved to know that very little of it ended up in my pocket — is as follows: if Mr A were guilty of the assault he would have got away with it, bar the slap on the wrist he received for escaping from custody; if he were innocent, he would have felt aggrieved at yet another injustice committed against him, which reinforced his casus belli against the whole of society.

Would Mr B be charged with wasting police time, I enquired naively? Oh no, I was told by lawyers on several sides of this case, we don’t do things like that. Anyway, what was I worrying about: as a barrister once said to console me when I complained of having waited three days in court without having given my evidence: “The meter’s still ticking.”

Cases such as the one I have outlined are very common. All my doctor and lawyer friends are familiar with them. Their prevalence is part of the dialectical relationship between the degeneration of the public service, which is now a vast trough from which a large class of educated people feed, and the appalling behaviour of the public that makes the expansion of the public service necessary, or at least justifies it, in the first place. As a 16th-century German bishop put it, “the poor are a gold mine”.

Lack of integrity and straightforwardness have a corrosive effect on the entire population. The police are now institutionally devious, if I may coin a phrase. A recent book by a PC Copperfield, called Wasting Police Time, tells us how the police improve their abominably low clear-up rates by various scams, for example charging both parties to a neighbourly scuffle with a crime, and getting both parties to make statements against the other on the promise that no charges will be brought.

Hey presto, two crimes have been solved for the price of one incident, to which almost certainly the police should not have been called in the first place. As to the burglary across the road, the householder will be lucky to receive any attention from the police other than a crime number.

Surely the imperative for high clear-up rates, and the tendency of a part of the population to use the police for purely temporary and personal ends, could be solved by increasing the number of prosecutions for wasting police time, at least until the habit of wasting police time itself became less widespread.

In the meantime, comrades (to quote the late Josef Stalin in another context), life is getting ever better, ever merrier: at least for the apparatchiks and nomenklatura of that vast organism that is spreading faster than killer bugs in the hospitals under its jurisdiction, the public administration of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

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