Growth, expansion, profit, fame, money, gimme gimme GIMME!!  It is all a bit undesirable, and as Austin points out, potentially damaging to the very fabric of our society.  If we aren't staying sharp on our juridical philosophy, Austin recommends keeping our consciences topped up aurally.

I love the spoken word, I enjoy listening to fine voices or even quirky voices for the sound sensation. One of the most enduringly ( and velvety) alluring voices on radio is that of Katherine Whitehorn, who is the doyenne of social commentary. Now a good age, Katherine has retained an almost hypnotic vocal mellowness, with the merest scintilla of lisp just to give additional richness.

I heard her on Friday evening on Radio 4 at the 8.45 comment slot, which used to be the Letter from America billet until the death of Alistair Cooke. This week, the theme was that size does matter ( she actually said the phrase . Perhaps you had to be there but coquettishness was a bonus I was not expecting). She took schools as her starting point, and, vastly knowledgeable and experienced as she is, expounded that the ongoing and apparently growing discipline problems in our schools is not so much to do with class or intelligence or teacher effort, but to do with roll numbers.

In short, while in a small school, the teachers and headmaster know everyone by name, and meet most if not all parents, in an industrial-size comp there is simply no opportunity to do so and the school becomes an impersonal institution where the human linkages are never forged. A pupil may say Captain My Captain , but the captain is up on the bridge filling out forms, and 3F are way down in the scuppers. Whitehorn can explain why public schools are big but relatively well-ordered. Even the biggest of these is divided up into Houses of manageable numbers led by a Housemaster/mistress and deputies making a knit community where misbehaviour is visible and suppressible.

OK – even the best schools currently have all sorts of discipline problems, drug taking, dangerous sexual behaviour, drinking . This just reflects greater society. But the worst is in those huge secondary schools and urban colleges where police have to patrol, and teachers are done down by the grind of endemic antisocial conduct.

I confess that to me KW’s thesis rings very true, and not just because of my addiction to her dulcet tones. Indeed, let’s turn the viewpoint round a few degrees . Even in the better schools the misbehaviour is an echo of the wider world. The WAG culture , the endless credit bonanza just passed, the contempt for learning and “culture” culture ( cf. Gail Trimble’s character assassination just for being clever and well-read) are our legacy. We have suffered – and connived at - a process of relentless and blind expansion in the last few decades to a point where the commercial and social machine has taken over, individualism, humility, gentleness and privacy have all been reduced to almost nothing.

Another tentacle of the expansionist process is the by now routine gobbling up of retail by the Tesco’s and Claire’s Accessories of this world. The number of small local traders put out of business is now beyond counting. Our local sports retailer, who has been there for decades, closed up at last because no matter what he did with prices, he was always going to lose out to the big chains who could buy in such bulk that competition became impossible. That spiral started many, many decades ago, but has reached the point of no return. How many high streets and shopping malls are carbon copies full of the national players alone?

But now it seems the world is changing again. Greed, we are beginning to find out, is not good, but throughout my adult life at least it has unstoppably over-run virtue, to leave the landscape barren apart from the tombstones of TV fame, unearned wealth and contempt for human dignity sticking up like blackened stumps across it.

Even in the legal profession, size is not a virtue. I bet my colleagues who invested heavily in building up large departments for property, commercial work, security work, regret it. I say this with not a shred of schadenfreude, but with genuine sympathy. What looked like the smart expansion has left millstones round many necks.

My mother-in-law, not a solicitor or businesswoman but a shrewd person in her own right as a private individual, used to have a saying “ It’s better to be ordinary”. As a Gemini-born, Jesuit-educated song-and-dance man I always resisted those words, but I know what she meant. In the context of today’s tide washing away so many pairs of feet of clay, the flamboyant or expansionist model of legal practice is more likely to be wrong than right. The small office general practitioner firm seems a much safer, if less sexy, bet.

I hope, both for our business and profession, and the wider Scottish and British world, that the shaking of the earth will put us on a different road. Firms with solid foundations and limited financial and capital exposure. Businesses run for a balance of factors and not just headlong towards the biggest profit. A society where not everything is enslaved to the pitiless market.

To finish on another broadcasting note, you may have seen a few weeks back the TV series in which a number of novices were given a share dealing room and money to invest, to see if they could turn a profit. The results were mixed as were the characters. But the process was truly horrific. Buying and selling were done at the touch of a key board and quick phone call to an unnamed bod with a mockney accent. We never saw an end user, any company premises, a managing director, a share certificate , a factory employee – the whole thing was slick, quick and utterly de-personalised. If that is where we are, then maybe we deserve the tower of Babel to be on the wobble.

So coming back to the blessed Katherine, if we make our schools like we make our country, suppressing individualism and worshipping WAGgery, we get the schools we deserve. And then when those pupils enter adult life, the spiral continues. Downwards.

We may be in the last days of ancient Rome, but she tells it so beautifully….

Austin