Anomie of the people

‘Anomie’ is what an old teacher of mine called a ‘sixth-form word’. (Year 13 for the youngsters among you.) That is to say, a word worth wheeling out in an A-level essay to impress the examiners. Or demonstrate one’s capacity for winging it.

I consider the word worth deploying again this week since ‘anomie’ – defined as ‘a condition of instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values or from a lack of common purpose’ – appears in danger of taking hold of the legal profession.

Perhaps I exaggerate, but consider the evidence. In an incident worthy of a Victorian melodrama (‘repent ye!’), a barrister interrupts a church service to rebuke his peers for acting for undesirables. The chair of the Legal Services Board suggests solicitors take a version of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath to cement their commitment to acting ethically. And influential advocates for a new ‘National Legal Service’ propose that City firms and wealthy litigants subsidise access to justice – from which one could infer that those well-heeled parties are somehow letting the side down at present.

Then, of course, there are SLAPPs, which Dominic Raab appears to have entered in the ‘too difficult’ column. Let’s leave that particular hand grenade for the next (probably Labour) government to pick up.

Ah, Labour. The real story of our interview with shadow justice secretary Steve Reed lies between the lines. Party discipline dictates that shadow ministers must not make spending commitments. We get that. But Reed does not give the impression that anything as ambitious as a National Legal Service is on his agenda. Labour must grow the economy before it can spend more, he says. (What about progressive taxation?)

Regarding a levy on City law firm profits to fund access, he says gnomically: ‘I won’t say what I will or won’t support’. Will Labour’s manifesto?

Ironically, one sage observation made this week about access to justice came from Lord McNally, an architect of LASPO, on the tenth anniversary of that notorious legislation. Getting legal aid right requires a grown-up debate among politicians and real honesty about what we are willing to spend, he tells the Gazette.

‘Honesty’? ‘Grown-up’? Well, that would be a start.