There is never a good time for politicians to give themselves a pay rise. Periods of public sector pay restraint, economic crisis or spending prudence are all inappropriate moments. If inflation is high, pay rises contribute to it; if low, they are thought unnecessary. Jack up salaries immediately before an election and, it is assumed, voters will wreak unspeakable vengeance; wait until afterwards and it looks like sharp practice. Long periods of self-denial - what John Prescott calls playing Jesus Christ - simply lead to what look like obscenely large catch-up rises when the brakes are released. And always, always, there will be the Daily Mail to contrive indignation over a prime-ministerial salary of £163,418 - Tony Blair's remuneration after last Monday's 41 per cent rise - while its editor receives a reported £600,000 a year, plus bonuses.

When the salaries of company bosses frequently touch seven figures, it is surely absurd to suggest that Gordon Brown, responsible for spending 39 per cent of GDP, or Estelle Morris, responsible for the education of several million children and students, should barely make it into six figures. What does it say about our attitudes to the public sector that we value its leaders so little? What does it say except that, judged by the turnout at the general election and the far smaller turnouts for local elections, we do not even care who runs it? To treat politicians with scepticism is a sign of democratic health; to treat them with automatic and unrelenting cynicism (so that any writer who questions this prevailing tone, as John Lloyd did in the NS two weeks ago, is himself accused of being compromised) suggests political sickness of the sort that afflicted the former Soviet Union. The political class is suffering a collapse of public confidence. Who is responsible?

Mr Lloyd blamed the media in general, and the literati in particular, for their detached disdain, their "moral intuition that politicians are rotten people". This attitude to government - the belief that it can never be up to any good - is another example of how our culture has been Americanised. Moreover, our age has a low boredom threshold; we like to change our heroes and role models as often as we change our clothes. When, as the playwright Arthur Miller observed in his recent Jefferson Lecture, just about the whole of public life is governed by modes of theatre - from tragedy to vaudeville to farce - politics may seem to lack the rapid variations in plot and character offered by the sport and entertainment industries.

Yet none of this gets to the heart of the problem: the strange love affair with the private sector conducted by successive governments since 1979. The 1970s, we can now see, were a watershed for the public sector, as the 1930s were for the private. After the Depression, it was assumed that nothing important could be done without the benefits of state planning. After the financial crises and public-sector strikes of the 1970s, it was assumed that only private business was any good at running things. Both views were equally mistaken but, under new Labour, we have still to put the second error behind us.

The disasters of Railtrack, British Telecom and Marks & Spencer remind us that the private sector is far from infallible. A morning spent trying to get service from a bank, an electricity company or a big mobile-phone network will show that private business has management and systems as arthritic as anything you will find in the public sector. But the issue goes deeper than that.

Whenever we privatise a public service, we remove a small element of public control and scrutiny. Sometimes, this may be a price worth paying, because the form the service takes is not a matter of serious contention - cleaning, say, or refuse collection, or certain medical operations. But to hand over control of schools to the private sector, for example, is a wholly different matter. People have different ideas about the purpose of education (as Socrates discovered to his cost) and it is therefore a legitimate subject of political contestation. A private company, however, will insist (rightly, by its own lights) that its decisions, taken in the interests of its shareholders, should not be overturned by mere voters, or by their elected representatives.

So why should people bother to vote? If the parties themselves don't believe in the importance or competence of elected representatives, why should the voters? For 20 years, we have been sneering at anyone who is elected to anything, whether it is parliament, a council or a trade union leadership. We have been told that business people (why does the media not treat them with cynical disdain?) are intelligent and imaginative, while elected people are venal and stupid. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. We are destroying democracy, and Labour now has what may be the last chance to stop it becoming a complete sham.

See you in court

In what academics call "late capitalism" (how they know it is not still early capitalism is unclear, but that is another matter), economic growth and job creation must come from service industries. And we look particularly to the litigation industry. A medal, then, for the lawyers who advised Martina Hingis, the top female tennis player, to sue her shoe supplier for nearly £30m, on the grounds that her shoes caused chronic injuries and damaged her career. Ingenious lawyers, even now, will be considering further possibilities. The former Labour leader Michael Foot could sue the manufacturer of the donkey jacket that he once wore at the Cenotaph, provoking a storm of press abuse that led to heavy defeat in the 1983 election. Shirley (now Baroness) Williams could sue her hairdresser for her failure ever to achieve the political heights that were predicted for her. And Michael Portillo? For the sake of hair gel manufacturers, we must hope that the quiff stays in place and that he wins the Tory leadership.

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