It is difficult to disagree, though one would be interested to know more about the views of Mr al-Masari, as an advocate of Sharia law, on the beheading and hand- chopping question, and indeed on the Salman Rushdie question.But might it be a necessary shame, given that so many jobs, wages and factories are at stake?On Friday, the Independent didn't bother to address this question at all - the beneficiaries were simply written off as "arms dealers", a trade to which the word racket conveniently applies, rather than manufacturing companies and workers.The Guardian said it was "self-interest of the narrowest kind" and that protection of British jobs would be "a more noble cause if it had been pursued elsewhere with equal enthusiasm to prevent the run-down of our manufacturing industry."Absolutely The run-down of industry, however, is now a historical fact. LIBERAL newspapers, the Guardian and the daily Independent, have taken an uncompromising stand on Mr al-Masari. We have read a lot about beheading and hand-chopping (and quite rightly, though I don't remember reading much about this during the Gulf War) and the shamefulness of the Government yielding to a blackmail whereby Britain wins pounds 5bn in arms orders from Saudi Arabia if it exports Mr al-Masari to the Caribbean island of Dominica.The Independent described it as "a stinking, rotten deal"; the Guardian said it made Britain look "ludicrous, and craven". Perhaps living in London is partly to blame, because British manufacturing, as the case of the Saudi dissident, Mohammed al- Masari, reminds us, still exists. Until I was well out of school I can't think that I knew anyone, other than shop-keepers, who did not belong to either of these categories, and now I know hardly anyone who belongs to the manufacturing class, unless one counts newspapers, television shows, and books. At Vickers, GEC and British Aerospace, large chunks of it hang by the frail thread linked to the royal family of Saudi Arabia.

The implication is that old ideas of what constitutes proper work linger on, from, in my own case, a childhood spent among people who either made things or were paid, usually out of taxation, to serve the public as a teacher or railwayman or civil servant. The EU, however, is more interested in cutting the existing pounds 1.26 per kilo subsidy for producers. It means prices could well stay high for the connoisseurs of good food for some time to come.. LAST week I met a friend whom I hadn't seen for a long time and asked her how she was earning a living these days. She replied that she was in the Indian art and antiques business, helping to establish the provenance of old paintings and sculpture which were being traded in the West.

I said: "That sounds like a good racket to be in." My friend took offence and I apologised. I hadn't meant the word racket in its more precise OED sense of "a scheme for obtaining money or attaining other ends by fraudulent and often violent means" but rather in the broader sense, which the Concise Oxford also allows, of "an activity, a way of life, a line of business". This usage has now become common and the reason is probably de-industrialisation and privatisation: you could hardly speak of the "coal-mining racket" or the "shipbuilding racket", but attach the word to "media" or "derivatives" and it becomes entirely appropriate. According to Dr Zhang, by the end "the baby was so hungry that she was trying to chew flesh off her hand". The cause of death was given as "congenital malformation of brain".During the last four days of December 1991, 15 children died: at least nine deaths resulted from hypothermia after the toddlers had been left tied to "potty chairs" in freezing weather wearing only thin cotton clothing for 24 hours.Dr Zhang describes a policy of "summary resolution" whereby the Shanghai orphanage population was kept static. Numerous case studies document deliberate starvation, torture and sexual assault over many years.

The records indicate that between 1986 and 1992 at this one Shanghai institution alone, more than 1,000 children died unnatural deaths.Sun Zhu, a baby girl, was admitted in June 1989 at age one month, and died two months later. They show, for example, that during 1989 one quarter of all children under the continuing care of China's urban orphanages died.The evidence of barbaric behaviour came from detailed official records smuggled out of the country by a doctor, Zhang Shuyun: she worked at the Shanghai Children's Welfare Institute from 1988 to 1993, and escaped from China last March. In the words of the organisation, many welfare institutions "appeared to be operating as little more than assembly lines for the elimination of unwanted orphans".Figures for national mortality rates for orphans and abandoned children were obtained by HRW from official Chinese published documents. By 12 December, her heartbeat was "low and shallow" and the "shape of intestines visible through abdomen".