The self-styled bad boy of Brexit doffs his suit jacket, revealing a pair of union flag cufflinks, and looks with interest around the Reading Room at 113 Chancery Lane, empty in the August heatwave.

‘What exactly is the Law Society’s role these days?’, asks Arron Banks. A reply citing the Legal Services Act is his cue for an attack on the whole Blair-era infrastructure of legal regulation – to be swept away by legislation tabled on day one of a Reform UK government.

Reform’s sustained lead in the opinion polls makes that a genuine possibility, says Banks. And, although holding no elected office (earlier this year, he narrowly lost the election for mayor of West of England), as a member of Nigel Farage’s inner circle, he is a key policymaker. The aim, he says, is for a Reform UK government to hit the ground running. ‘We’ve been thinking very much about Trump’s first term,’ he says. ‘He was elected on the promise of radical change, but then was stopped. The second time round, he’s been better prepared.

‘What I think is needed is a Big Beautiful Reform Bill at the beginning of the administration. We’re going to spend a couple of years framing the legislation and be ready to go on Day One. It will involve repeal of most of the legislation of the past 20 years, wholesale.’

Perhaps by coincidence, Banks was speaking to the Gazette on the day his party leader unveiled ‘Operation Restoring Justice’, described as a ‘five-year emergency programme intended to identify, detain and deport illegal immigrants from the United Kingdom, and to deter any further build‑up’. The programme would involve leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, repealing the Human Rights Act and replacing it with a ‘British Bill of Rights’, and new primary legislation in the form of an ‘Illegal Migration (Mass Deportation) Bill’.

But Banks’ programme, presumably endorsed by justice spokesperson Ann Widdecombe, seems to go much further than the headline-grabbing ‘stop the boats’ agenda: ‘The whole system needs to be restored.’

Banks cites the example of a creakingly slow prosecution following a jewellery robbery as evidence of a justice system which has ‘ground to a halt’. His solution? ‘Elimination of the Blair reforms, both in criminal and commercial law.’

On criminal justice, Banks blames Blairite innovations for frustrating the system’s ability to dispense ‘justice at the sharp end’. He evokes a nostalgia for courts presided over by no-nonsense judges, dealing briskly with the misdemeanours of the night before. ‘Of course there will be mistakes,’ he concedes. ‘But we can deal with those rather than turn [every summary trial] into a full production number. Criminal justice needs a return to a proper magistrates’ system where magistrates can revert to common sense.’

However, his enthusiasm for summary justice does not extend to support for Sir Brian Leveson’s proposals to set up a Crown Court Bench Division. ‘Jury trials should be kept for where liberty is at risk.’

In today’s system, he says, crimes go almost unpunished. He brings up the topic of Lucy Connolly’s conviction for inciting racial hatred. ‘She should never have written [the offending tweet]… but it cannot be right that something like that is a bigger crime than actually going and hitting someone with a baseball bat.’

On civil justice, he is, if possible, even more scathing about the current establishment. ‘The whole system is designed for all these parasites to feed on it.’ Banks condemns elite City firms as ‘specialists on lawfare, making profits of 40% on turnover across the board, while the smaller rivals are being crushed to pieces’. The party is ‘looking at legislation’ to curb abuses, he says, though he seems unenthusiastic about the current anti-SLAPP agenda, saying lawfare goes far beyond defamation actions (a field in which he is no stranger).

Rather, he sees a wide range of cases ‘where the legal system isn’t working’, in which expensive City lawyers generate legal work on behalf of big corporations. Unsurprisingly, given his background in the insurance business, he is critical of the personal injury sector, for example favouring the New Zealand approach to clinical negligence claims. ‘We could go to no-fault tomorrow if you really wanted to, but these huge law firms are lobbying against it.’

As for the apparent explosion in collective action claims under competition law: ‘Disgraceful, it’s just income generation for law firms.’ Citing the Supreme Court’s car finance judgment, he asks: ‘Does the car buyer care about the arrangement between the dealer and the finance company? Who will pay for all this? It’s like watching a parade – if you stand on a chair to get a better view, soon pretty well everyone will be doing that. It is achieving nothing except clogging up the courts on something that shouldn’t be there.’

Reform, he says, will shine the spotlight on actors who ‘we think have been abusive’.

But wouldn’t a Reform government want to celebrate the UK legal sector as a success story? No: ‘It is a drain on the economy to have these parasites. The top 20 law firms are making obscene profits while the underlying economy is doing very badly. The economy needs to be geared up for the user, not the abuser.’

The judiciary will also feel the wind of change. Banks is quick to bring up the topic of ‘activist judges’, adding: ‘Every immigration lawyer and judge is pro-immigration.’ But again, he lays the blame on constitutional innovations, to be addressed by Reform’s proposed reset bill. Out will go the Judicial Appointments Commission, for example, and by implication the Sentencing Council, to give judges more professional freedom. ‘We need to systematically undo 40 years of bad legislation. Let the judges be back in control.’

However, Banks concedes that one Blairite innovation is here to stay: ‘I think you’d have to keep the Supreme Court, now you’ve got it. You couldn’t go back to the House of Lords.’

The judiciary as a whole ‘have to reflect public opinion, otherwise what is the point of elected government?’ So could direct judicial elections be on the Reform agenda? ‘That’s one thing that’s got to be looked at,’ he muses. ‘You can’t have the judges wholly at odds with the views of the population. I’m not sure we have the answer to that, but there may very well be one by the time we hit the ground running.’

What of the wider legal profession? Here, we come back to legal regulation. ‘The Legal Services Act will be one of the things we want to fix on Day One,’ he says. In particular, ‘the SRA needs to be abolished post-haste. It couldn’t find an elephant in the room, but can find a cockroach in the skirting board. I can’t see how the SRA has in any shape or form improved the professional standards of lawyers’.

So a return to self-regulation? ‘Barristers and solicitors are supposed to be officers of the court, though we have to accept the fact that there are rotten apples in every barrel,’ but he would trust the professions to police their own. And, incidentally, ‘the whole E + D thing needs to be knocked on the head. It’s just bullshit’.

Among other things, he suggests that the great reset will involve returning legal regulation to the legacy professional bodies. He does not actually use the words ‘make the Law Society great again’, but that seems to be the idea. Whether that vision will appeal to the Society – let alone the wider legal establishment – is, to put it mildly, uncertain. (The Society has not scheduled any events for Reform UK’s party conference, which opens today.)

But first, of course, Banks and his comrades will have to turn their opinion poll lead (11 points ahead of Labour as of 1 September, according to Politico’s Poll of Polls) into a general election majority.

For all of Banks’ boosterism, this is far from a certainty. Apart from the tendency for voters to revert from protest to mainstream parties, there is also the possibility – some would say the likelihood – that a party is fissiparous and Reform UK will not be with us in 2029.

Nonetheless, given Banks’ track record, his ideas cannot be left unexamined, much less written off.

 

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