PD James is absolutely right to have raised a Public Lending Right alarm. Last week, she wrote to the new culture secretary Jeremy Hunt urging him to resist any Treasury attempt, during the imminent austerity budget, to cut PLR. This very limited annual remuneration is, as James noted, a kind of "pension" for some struggling authors. Capped at £5,000, PLR is modest, but it can be a lifeline.

PLR, which recently celebrated its 21st birthday, was a milestone in its day, the result of a long and passionate campaign by Brigid Brophy and Maureen Duffy. It would be a bad day for English letters if it were to be abolished. Libraries took a terrible beating under the last government. Cutting authors' earnings from an already diminished and demoralised service would be the last straw.

Looking at the bigger picture, the Arts Council is certainly facing an uphill battle for survival. But I'm not too pessimistic. Maybe, in the event, the threat to our literature will be more apparent than real. To play devil's advocate for a moment, a literature that can only flourish in boom times is not the literature that comes down to us from Jonson, Milton, Pope, Fielding and Austen.

It's hard to quantify the real impact of government on books. In hindsight, Mrs Thatcher (memorably skewered by Rushdie as Mrs Torture) and her government presided, albeit negligently and with a very bad grace, over the biggest boom in British books since the second world war. Waterstone's flourished. The Booker prize went global. Domestic consumption of books soared above £2bn. A lot of well-established names got started in the 1980s and early 90s (Jeannette Winterson, Hanif Kureishi, Nick Hornby and Kate Mosse to name a few). In the department of unintended consequences, there may be other silver linings to be detected in the cultural climate sponsored by a right-wing coalition. PD James is right to be vigilant, but the outcome of any cuts may not fulfil the worst-case scenario.