Felix | Dangerous presumptions

Although it is important always to remember that one should not believe everything one reads in the newspapers, there is a grim irony and morbid satisfaction from seeing in The Guardian a report by Owen Bowcott, 'Haulage firm bids for new legal aid contracts'. So now we really know what is trucking towards us head-on for sure; when it gets in the papers our fears really are justified. This time around, as both the Bar and solicitors fight for their very survival, there has been increasing media coverage, and the sense from the papers and others that this is a real story that is worth running. Now that there is serious reporting about the potential extinction of a justice system that is never perfect, but still probably the best that anyone can manage anywhere in the world, we know that our fears are real and the battle is drawn.

Is it really the case that the skills and competencies required for running a logistics network are complimentary to running the provision of legal advice where liberty and livelihood are at stake? As highly talented as we are, I don't think that there are many barristers or solicitors who think they are up to running a national haulage operation, however aloof and arrogant we may be perceived to be.

Plainly, for things to have got this far the government and its advisers must genuinely believe a number of the following entrenched principles.

The first is that only guilty people are ever arrested - therefore that means that every time the right person is arrested for the right offence, it is just a shame that juries are a bit stupid sometimes and let people off when they should not. The point here is that trials - oh if you really must, but don't take long over it will you - are an expensive luxury because everybody is guilty anyway, so why not keep them as short as possible? It also therefore does not matter if the defendant is represented by someone who is not very good at the job.

The second firm belief is that defence advocates spend a lot of time needlessly prolonging trials simply to line their own pockets at the expense of the tax payer. Quite how we do this has not been made clear. Perhaps we sit in the robing room and dream up non-points to argue as matters of law? Perhaps we ask witnesses lots of unnecessary questions? Presumably then this means the government thinks that the judge is asleep or somehow going along with it, rather than killing a bogus argument stone dead and halting irrelevant cross-examination.

Thirdly, they must think that we alone of all other professionals think, and indeed manage, to generate more work by doing work very badly. For example, in the same way that a bad builder plainly gets a lot more work by building a house badly and having to pull it down and start again, we get more work by representing people really badly so that they don't for example plead when they should, or upset everyone, or make a trial last forever.

Fourthly they must think that we do not share the same characteristics as other human beings, in that we do not need to be able to eat, shelter and clothe ourselves and our families, as working for £15 a day at the tail end of a case (gross) is plainly ample.

Fifthly, and this must be a real article of faith, the government and its advisers in its constituent parts must be utterly reassured that none of them, their friends or family or anyone else that they care about, will ever be in the wrong place at the wrong time and end up in court, whether as a defendant or a victim. If they thought otherwise they might be a bit concerned that a guilty person might walk free when they should not and an innocent person be convicted.

On the same track, there has never been such a thing as an honest but mistaken identification witness, a false complaint of a sexual offence, or anyone acting in self-defence. It just goes to show that we have been wasting ours and countless juries' time giving Turnbull warnings on identification or carefully crafted directions on lawful/unlawful violence and self-defence.

Lastly, and most clearly, they cannot think that our system of careful, robust, quality-lead criminal justice is not worth bothering about anymore. We do not need it and we should never have had it in the first place: it is an expensive luxury, like an under-used holiday home, and we won't even miss it when it has gone.

Government does not understand that the way barristers are trained is highly personal - the ethics, the way that a Crown Court trial at times explores the worst excesses of man's inhumanity to man does so forensically and aseptically so that everyone has their say, the whole thing is not one big shouting match, and that justice is done. This sort of thing cannot be re-invented once it is lost. There can be no DNA capture that we can store to bring it back to life again when we realise what we have lost.

All that will happen in the future is that we shall have a new system of slip-shod justice, rough justice - oh, private justice. The well-off will be paying out for a Rolls Royce service, while we're stuck with '¨Eddie Stobart.

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