A legal dream involving Reform UK

Following the Reform UK conference last week, a number of commentators have pointed to the emulation of a Trump-like approach and Trump-like policies (‘Make Britain Great Again’, DOGE-like teams in local authorities). 

So, knowing what is happening in the USA, here follows a sketch of possible legal services policies if a UK Trump were elected as our prime minister.

I know that our electoral system, our unwritten constitution, and our culture are very different, and there would be no automatic write-over from the USA. Nigel Farage is not Donald Trump, and Reform UK is not the current incarnation of the Republican party and the MAGA movement. I shall imagine instead a government of a fictional Donald Farage (DF).

There would be good news for some. The Gazette has already covered the views of a key Reform UK policy-maker in relation to the Legal Services Act 2007 and the continuation of the Solicitors Regulation Authority. Both would be abolished – and many in the legal profession would cheer.

For lawyers, the likeliest early challenge could be through attacks on sections of the profession.

The Trump administration issued an early executive order called Preventing Abuses of the Legal System and the Federal Court. This quote gives a flavour:

‘The immigration system — where rampant fraud and meritless claims have supplanted the constitutional and lawful bases upon which the President exercises core powers under Article II of the United States Constitution — is likewise replete with examples of unscrupulous behavior by attorneys and law firms. For instance, the immigration bar, and powerful Big Law pro bono practices, frequently coach clients to conceal their past or lie about their circumstances when asserting their asylum claims, all in an attempt to circumvent immigration policies enacted to protect our national security and deceive the immigration authorities and courts into granting them undeserved relief.’

Government authorities were ordered to search for such behaviour, and severe sanctions were outlined for those who fell within the definitions.

This is not new to us. Immigration solicitors (‘lefty lawyers’ in general) found themselves on the wrong side of government attacks under the previous UK administration.

Solicitors who represent clients opposed to government actions in areas covering not only immigration, but also diversity, climate change and other policy priorities of a DF government, may well find themselves in the cross-hairs. The actual sanctions might be few, but the chilling effect will be wider.

Then we come to the judges. In the USA now, judges are in the front line of keeping the constitution on track, and are regularly lambasted for it or face impeachment calls. The president called one Republican-appointed judge a ‘radical left lunatic’. His supporters order anonymous pizza deliveries to dissenting judges’ private homes, to intimidate them.

Again, judges in the UK are already facing threats. We are familiar with the ‘Enemies of the people’ headline in the Daily Mail from nearly 10 years ago, which the government at the time was slow to condemn.

There was a faint echo of a further move towards an American system in a recent article about the backgrounds of the judges in the controversial Epping asylum hotel cases. We were told that the judge who ruled in favour of Epping District Council to close down the hotel was a previous Tory Parliamentary candidate, and that one of the three judges who ruled in favour of the government on appeal was a former treasurer of the Society of Labour Lawyers, chaired the Fabian Society and was a founder member of Matrix Chambers, whose members include the current attorney general, Lord Hermer.

Under this analysis, the law no longer matters, because judges are political activists who will ignore their judicial oath to ‘… do right to all manner of people after the laws and usages of this realm, without fear or favour, affection or ill will.’

It is not that the judicial appointments process cannot be criticised. For instance, solicitors, despite being champions of the UK economy and leading legal services worldwide, are seen as somehow unfit to be judges in great numbers. Women are failing to become senior judges. And there are criticisms about how representative the judiciary is of the legal profession and wider population.

But the success of the UK courts in attracting international business is evidence of the high quality of appointed judges. Do we expect our judges to have lived the lives of mice before appointment, never going out of the house to exercise choices – or, if they have exercised choices, to be unable to cast them aside when acting in a responsible and public capacity?

For a losing party to ascribe a court loss to political activism leads to an eventual corruption of the system as a whole.

So, if a DF government is elected, and these turn out to be its policies: will the legal profession have the courage to stand up to protect its professional values and our legal system?

Jonathan Goldsmith is Law Society Council member for EU & International, chair of the Law Society’s Policy & Regulatory Affairs Committee and a member of its board. All views expressed are personal and are not made in his capacity as a Law Society Council member, nor on behalf of the Law Society