The Lord Chancellor is fond of 'laying down the law', as the headline put it in a recent interview (see [1999] Gazette, 14 April, 14).

He is, no doubt, a forceful character -- on a par with Lord Hailsham at his most pugnacious.

Indeed, Lord Irvine rarely seems to be less than certain of whatever he is opining about, even if it is the dead opposite of a previous opinion no less thunderously held -- as with conditional fees.What I realised in the course of the hard but fairly fought debates in the House of Lords on the so-called Access to Justice Bill, is that the Lord Chancellor and his parliamentary and civil service team -- including MPs Geoff Hoon and David Lock -- are out of touch with the realities of legal aid.

None, as far as I am aware, has been a practising solicitor, let alone a legal aid lawyer.

Lords Irvine and Falconer -- who shared the Lords debates -- were both at the fat cat end of the Bar.

They are not to be blamed for that, but it is as though the NATO team overseeing Kosovo was devoid of soldiers.This want of legal aid experience was not made up for either by effective consultation with solicitors -- only a tiny number of whom responded to the Legal Aid Board's (LAB) consultation last year -- or by the two solicitor special advisers to the Lord Chancellor, Garry Hart and Victor Benjamin.

Excellent men though they are, the former spent his entire career with City colossus Herbert Smith, and the latter his main career as deputy chairman at Tesco.Against that background, the major structural and practical defects of Lord Irvine's highly dirigiste blueprint for reform are scarcely surprising.

But the inexperience would, it might be thoug ht, have called for a certain humility towards those who carried the heat and burden of providing the public with the three and a half million acts of assistance under legal aid last year.

Instead, the drip, drip of denigration from government spokesmen has merely served to enrage this already demoralised section of the legal profession.For example, in the Gazette interview Lord Irvine repeated the astonishing claim that he made in the Lords debate, namely that legal aid solicitors have been 'feather-bedded'.

That may derive partly from Steve Orchard, the non-solicitor chief executive of the LAB, who went out of his way on Clive Anderson's programme on Radio 4 recently to invite the public to marvel at the sums being paid to solicitors under legal aid.Denigration, indeed, seems built into the government case for reform.

In the Lords I was repeatedly charged when resisting, for example, competitive block tendering, replacement of legal aid by conditional fees and a single budget for unlimited criminal and capped civil legal aid, with being little more than a shop steward for my self-protective solicitor colleagues.Then there has been the oft-repeated and glib slur that in many legal aid actions, solicitors take bad cases simply to feather their own nests (as if there were no merits test) or wilfully string out actions (as if a lot of practitioners do not have to handle far too many cases already in order to make a tolerable living) and are afraid to take commercial risks (as if that were their main objection to conditional fees).The lessons of the last government's handling of teachers (is anyone surprised that we now face a shortage?) and the National Health Service (much of the restructuring of which is now being dismantled by Mr Dobson) seem to have taught the current Lord Chancellor's Department nothing.

That is scandalous and sad, because in the end the good reforms -- the Community Legal Service for example -- will be overshadowed by the damage the Bill will do to poor litigants.