In the Wet

"Shute was an engineer and a successful aircraft designer. People who judge the standard of their books by slightly higher measures than I do, might think that these books read more like engineering than like fiction. But the fact is they are very well engineered and they all have an understanding of what prewar society was like and they have a strong hatred of snobbery, which he particularly loathed. In this case you move from a disillusioned Anglican parson in the wilds of Australia going to the rescue of an old drunk man and being transported as a result, into an attempt to murder the Queen in an imaginary Britain of the early 1950s. It also contains an enormous amount of really interesting constitutional theory. I can’t tell you how many things this book covers and how satisfying it is to read it. Again, I would recommend it to any intelligent person, and you would never guess from the opening pages where it’s going to take you, but when you get there you won’t be sorry. Well, the argument is curiously familiar. The country is going bankrupt and there isn’t any way to stop it doing so except abandoning the electoral system which rewards the governments who bribe their voters with their own money. So, rather than taking the vote away from the masses, the proposal is to give extra votes to people who are qualified to have them. So, if you have a university degree or have served in the armed forces or if you have a proper skill you can pile up extra votes to a total of six. If you then do something fantastic or brave you get the seventh vote, which is the highest honour available. As soon as this system is introduced governments which want to bribe their own electorate cease to be elected because good sense takes over. I find it curiously attractive, but I can’t believe they’d ever get away with it."