There is another kind of statute in English law that summarises the findings of the court, for instance the Occupiers' Liability Act. Occupiers' liability was discovered by judges in Australia when the railways started being built. Gradually, the judges built up a wonderful system of law about what your duties and rights are if you occupy land, even if you don't actually own it. Then, at a certain stage, parliament said: "Let's gather this all together and we'll have a single statute." But codification, as in the Roman law under Justinian, came after the event. That's perhaps an even better way of producing a statute than from committees.

RT: Imagine we go back 200 years, to when Edmund Burke was alive. Much has happened since then to make the world a better and more just place for the average person. And a lot of it has been top-down — it's been driven by visionaries, leaders and a lot of it has been enshrined in statute. I'm thinking about the extension of the franchise, the Ten Hour Act and improvements in health and safety at work. Do you think those things would have risen up from the people without the interference of the kind of top-down meddlers, the people who cause you nightmares?

RS: These are serious issues that one needs to discuss. One needs to look at where top-down approaches came up with a solution that is indeed to the benefit of all and where they did not. You're right that the extension of the franchise is one of these. I should say, though, that the franchise was extended partly as a result of conversations in the Reform Club, not only as a result of things in parliament. It came from people who felt that our country really needed to include more of the people in the franchise in order to cope with all the changes that were happening — migrations to the towns, changes in property and so on. The 1832 Reform Act wasn't a decision of a dictatorial kind — a lot of these things that the 19th century begs to be remembered by began as civil initiatives. The Factory Acts began because exploited children were suddenly apparent to well-off compassionate people. Before that, they'd been working just as hard in the fields but not observed by those who had the influence or the will to help them. As always in England, it wasn't very long from the first impulse of reform in the minds of ordinary citizens to the statute that conveyed what they wanted.

RT: The Human Rights Act is clearly a supreme example of a top-down intervention to which you're allergic. But let us think of the origin of the kind of law we both approve of. One can imagine an emerging concern, about hungry children visible in the streets as they were not before. There are whispers in corridors of clubs and soon the corridors of power are echoing with concerns. But sooner or later, these concerns have to be translated into law.

RS: Parliament was originally conceived in the Middle Ages as a court of law. The members passed judgment by statute, which was a recommendation to the king effectively to rectify an abuse. The resulting statute was then tested in the courts. Things were different then but until joining the EU, it was the case that any statute passed by parliament had to be tested against popular acceptance. People were entitled to vote at an election to get rid of the people who passed that statute and put another one in its place, or repeal it. We can still do this every now and then...