I have been elected by the profession to address its problems.

I want to talk about these problems but, at the same time, to put them in their proper context, the public interest.

The problems we all know about only too well.

One recent survey suggested that 25% of principals in two to four-partner firms have an income of less then the average salary for a secondary school teacher.

Many high street practices have failed.

Others survive by courtesy of their bank manager with overdrafts which they have little hope of ever repaying.

And this misery is by no means confined to small high street firms.

Medium-sized metropolitan practices have also been afflicted.

What we see, therefore, is a profession which the senior partner of one large city firm described to me as 'in extremis'.But why should anyone be interested in the private sorrows of the legal profession? On the contrary, did not some early Thatcherite describe all professions as conspiracies against the public interest?Which brings me to Thatcherism -- something which, like many of you, no doubt, I saw at one time as the salvation of the country.

The Prime Minister has spoken of his aspiration for 'a nation at ease with itself'.

Well, whatever the achievements of the last 16 years may be, that, certainly, is not one of them.

The Thatcherist state, pre-eminently is made up of non-cohering particles, individuals elbowing, pushing and shoving each other in a free market until, at the age of 50, they receive their compulsory redundancy package.

RIP.

All the professions also are expected to perform in this murky pond.

If they drown in the process, then so much the worse for them.It is worth looking briefly at some of the achievements of this philosophy.

Admittedly, it is said, Thatcherism is a brutal creed but at least it delivers.

What, then, has it delivered:-- Our national per capita income is the lowest in Western Europe with the exception of Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain.-- In the UK, a single person receives a state pension of £5960.

It is £8240 in the USA and £15,000 in Germany.-- The proportion of national income taken in ta xation is now greater than it was in 1979.

Here I may note a recent complaint that: 'Inheritance tax levels are scandalous with people worse off under the Conservatives than they were under Labour.' That complaint was made by the well known left wing organisation, the Country Land Owners Association.-- While we have a trade deficit of over £10 billion the French have a surplus of over £26 billion and the Italians a surplus of over £13 billion.We have to refute the government's lie that in the nation at large all is well, its policies are working and that our economy is the envy of our neighbours.

If the lawyers are doing badly then that must be because they represent a little pocket of restrictive practices and out-moded attitudes.

On the contrary, lawyers are not the exception.

We are typical.None of the professions is in good heart.

Recently, both the British Dental Association and the British Medical Association published reports about the low morale of their members.Only two weeks ago the Royal College of Nursing published the results of its annual survey of nurses which found that their morale was so low that over 60% of them were considering leaving the NHS.

One reason they gave for their discontent was that they 'felt they were no longer being treated as professionals'.

Well, we all recognise that grievance.Let us, then, put the problems of our profession into proper context.

Our problems can be described simply: our income from conveyancing has been eroded, fee rates for legal aid have been cut.

With the divorce white paper and the legal aid green paper, there are plans to reduce our income still further.

And if this were not enough, the provisions in the Courts and Legal Services Act permitting non solicitors to apply for grants of probate will shortly come into force.All these things, of course, are bad for us.

But are they bad for the public too? Many people applauded Thatcherism as a kind of return to old-style Conservatism.

It was, of course, nothing of the sort.

Rather, it was a crude laissez faire-ism whose major tenets were that the market was always right, that it was invariably for the benefit of the consumers that they should get the lowest possible price, and that if the weakest went to the wall, so much the worse for the weakest and so much the better for the community.We see the catastrophic consequences of such doctrines all around us.

At one extreme, we have the continuing decline of British manufacturing industry.

At the other, the traditional village shop and post office have been wiped out under the competition of the huge area supermarkets.

Twenty years ago we set up factories in Korea to take advantage of the low wage labour force.

Now the Koreans set up factories here for the same reason.Research has revealed the interesting fact that while people generally have a poor opinion of lawyers they have a high opinion of their own solicitor.

Not so long ago, people who used a solicitor at all would regard him as their 'family solicitor'.

Routinely, this solicitor would indeed act for the whole family in a lifetime's transactions.

He would convey their houses, make their wills, advise them in their business ventures, handle their divorces and eventually wind-up their estates.

The high street practitioner occupied a role similar to that of the family doctor and one hardly less valuable.

Here, it is curious to note, that anti-lawyer rhetoric from certain quarters goes hand in hand with calls for greater access to justice.

It is the traditional high street firm, of course, which provided access t o justice.Only a few years ago, conveyancing fees were charged in accordance with fixed scales.

It may well be that the fees charged then were too high.

Now, they are undoubtedly too low.

In the short term, the consequence of this is a multitude of high street firms who can barely pay their way.

In the longer term, it will mean that a number of them will be eliminated altogether and domestic conveyancing will be carried out by second-rate corner cutters who will rely on the rest of the profession to bail them out (via the Solicitors Indemnity Fund) when their mistakes eventually emerge.

Meanwhile, the all-round service provided by the traditional high street practice will have disappeared.

Now, I ask how such a state of affairs can possibly be in the public interest.And if anyone tells me that absurdly low conveyancing fees are the result of free competition, my reply is that that is fiction.

The reality is that it is estate agents who in their own interest dictate the level of high street conveyancing fees.A solicitor who does not comply soon finds that he has no conveyancing work at all.

The 'free market' here, as elsewhere, when closely examined is an illusion.

I am determined to do my utmost to restore a reasonable and enforceable domestic fee scale.

By reasonable, I mean a fee which everyone, the consumerists included, would recognise as fair and moderate.

By enforceable, I mean that the undercutters are welcome to undercut but if they do, they must insure themselves and not look to you and me to subsidise them.I have mentioned that the profession stands to lose income from another traditional source, probate.

Thanks to the Courts and Legal Services Act, non-solicitors will be able to apply for probate.

It is the financial institutions which will be most likely to profit from the change.

Will these charge less for their services than solicitors? Judging from the past, they will do nothing of the sort.

How, then, will they get the work? They will acquire it as they do now through their superior bargaining position in relation to their customers.

What can the Law Society do about it? It can do two things in particular.

One is a short term measure, the other long term.

In the short term, the Law Society must promote solicitors' services as probate practitioners on the basis of their expertise and their price competitiveness.

I believe that in both these respects, their superiority to the institutions can be demonstrated.

In the long term, I think it important to re-emphasise the role of solicitors as what used to be called men of affairs (now, of course, we would be talking of men and women of affairs).

It was not so long ago that a solicitor would be the first port of call (and probably the last as well) for general financial advice.

Who gives such advice now? The answer is that it is given by self-interested purveyors of pension and insurance policies or by teenage 'financial advisers' whose real function is to act as salesmen and collectors of commissions for their employers.

I would like the legal practice course extended to provide solicitors with greater expertise to advise on the whole range of the average client's financial problems.

This we know, is a very competitive market.

Well, let us take active steps to place ourselves ahead of the competition.I now come to the divorce white paper.

This, of course, is by no means the first excursion of the government into family law.

Who will ever forget the child support scheme? This lingers on, a shadow of its former self, though it still managed to cost the taxpay er £104 million this year.

In its heyday, the scheme was a model of injustice, incoherence and bureaucratic ineptitude.Anyway, from one fiasco to another.

Many of you, no doubt, will be familiar with the white paper with its stirring and original title, 'Looking to the future'.

The white paper proposals are wholly bogus.

Their central assumption is that the pain of divorce arises from the fault-based procedures.

Alter the procedures and the pain disappears.

All family law practitioners here know that divorce and separation cause pain because people are being deprived of all that matters most to them, their homes, children and income.None of the white paper proposals address these fundamental problems.

Instead we have a reiteration of the buzzword 'mediation'.

'Mediation', it seems, will help people to come to terms with their losses or sense of injustice.

Or perhaps it may help them to imagine that they have not lost anything or their perceived injustice is a fiction.

In another context, the Lord Chancellor referred to lawyers' fantasies.

What greater fantasy could there be than this?The small print for the lawyers, of course, is that so far as possible, they will be eased out of the divorce procedures altogether.

It is expected that during 'mediation', the parties should not in general be legally represented.

Once the mediation has been completed the lawyers' role would be to translate the mediated agreement into a consent order.

We are told, in particular, that: 'The government does not envisage allowing either uncontrolled access to lawyer representation as opposed to specific advice on specific issues or for solicitors to be employed at the expense of the taxpayer to go over the ground already covered unnecessarily.' The government's belief is that: 'It would not be necessary for lawyers to shadow mediation or, except in rare cases, to unpick mediated agreements.'Here we have a denial of the obvious reality that in almost every divorce the parties do not, in fact, have the same interests.

A good lawyer will get a better deal for his or her client.

That is what the lawyer is for.

That is what he or she should be for.

Bear in mind here that 87% of matrimonial cases are settled before they get to court and they are settled on the advice of the lawyers.

The white paper proposals will mean that those people who cannot afford to pay privately for lawyers will be left in substance to the mercies of the mediator.

Those who can pay will continue to employ lawyers as before.

I now come to the legal aid green paper.

We are told in the first paragraph that: 'The aim of the government is to improve access to justice.' You can be absolutely certain, then, that whatever the green paper is about, it is not that.Let me look at the illness and then at the cure.

We all know about the high profile abuses -- the man with three houses and a Rolls Royce who is granted legal aid.

We know also about the unmeritorious cases -- the two ladies fighting over the right to dispose of their deceased lover's remains at the taxpayer's expense.

Then we have green form abuse or fraud.

The essential thing about all these abuses is that they have always occurred.

In recent years there seem to have been more of them.

And they are all matters entirely within the capacity and responsibility of the Legal Aid Board to deal with.

I think, for example, of the litigant on £40,000 a year who, so it was reported, took indefinite unpaid leave to enable him to qualify for legal aid.

Is a case like that within the regulations? If so, why? If it is not, then what did the Legal Aid Board do about it? On the government's role in rooting out abuses I can do no better than quote from the recent comments of the House of Commons public accounts committee on the failure of justices' clerks to complete adequately the statements of means of legal aid applicants.

Here we are dealing in real money (with criminal legal aid expenditure running at an annual £432 million).

The report says: 'We are dismayed that after four years in which the Auditor-General has qualified his opinion on the accounts and eight separate initiatives, the Lord Chancellor's Department has failed to resolve satisfactorily this problem.' These words place responsibility squarely where responsibility belongs.So much for the ills.

What about the cures? The government's main proposal is to set overall cash limits for legal aid expenditure.

The Legal Aid Board would then invite tenders for particular segments of work from franchised solicitors only.

Contracts will be awarded, so we are told, on the basis of quality, geographical location, volume and price.

There are no actual or contemplated procedures for effective monitoring of quality.

In reality, therefore, contracts will be awarded to the lowest tenderer.

That lowest tenderer (who will probably have quoted at levels even lower than present legal aid rates) will then be expected to deliver a quality service.

That this is in the least probable is yet another fantasy.

In reality the successful tenderer will have every incentive to provide what the Legal Aid Board is paying for, a cut-price bargain basement deal.What of the firms at present doing legal aid work who do not obtain contracts? They are not going to be able to keep their staff and overheads and wait until contracts are awarded next time round.

They will make the redundancies they have to and abandon legal aid work altogether.

Many legal aid firms, of course, will go out of business.

Ordinary people will find it increasingly hard to find a local solicitor when they need help.

If the government's proposals are implemented, the results will be two-fold: a cut-price service carried out by a small minority of second rate firms; the abandonment of legal aid as a service available to people of modest means and provided by the great majority of solicitors.

The stated object of the green paper, as we have seen, is to 'improve access to justice'.

Was there ever such a fraud?I promised I would not make a trade union speech.

That means that I will not demand anything for the profession which cannot be justified in the wider public interest.

At the same time, I recognise that just as there is a minority of bad doctors, a minority of bad architects, so there is a minority of bad lawyers doing bad work.

No one is more anxious than I that they should be rooted out.

Legal aid abuses I have already mentioned.

It is in the public interest and, therefore, in our interest that these should at long last be eliminated.The point about abuses is that they discredit schemes and institutions which essentially are beneficial.

I think, for example, of industrial tribunals.

These were set up to provide justice for people who had been badly treated by their employers.

In most cases that is the role they do, in fact, perform.

At the same time, some tribunals have allowed themselves to be hijacked (all too willingly, I fear) by the discrimination industry.

Think, for instance, of the notorious pregnant servicewomen awards (a soap opera which continues to run).

Or the case of the sensitive Irishman whose hurt feelings were solaced by the handout of £30,000 of public money.

Or the temporary secretary who, after working in her job for two hours, obtained over £8000 in damages when her employer used 'gender specific verbal abuse' towards her.

So long as tribunals collaborate in what the public rightly perceives as an abuse it becomes politically impossible that legal aid should be extended to ordinary people seeking to pursue reasonable unfair dismissal claims.And while we are on the subject of abuses: should not those bodies who fund and encourage these preposterous applications -- the Equal Opportunities Commission and the Commission for Racial Equality -- have their wings clipped? Is it not time to consider whether they have outlived their usefulness? Are they a public benefit or a public nuisance? These organisations were originally set up, quite rightly, to produce greater cohesiveness in society.

It is now arguable that they are doing the opposite.I have already announced that at the end of my term of office, I intend to stand for re-election.

I will not accept the Council's nomination or endorsement even if it is offered.

I hope to offer myself on the basis of actual achievements.

What achievements? Now, of course, I cannot promise to deliver, only to do my best to deliver.

I have already established, in accordance with my election manifesto, working parties to look at ways of reducing the burden of indemnity insurance (no one here needs to be told anything about that), to address the long term problem of excessive numbers coming into the profession, to improve our public image.

We are in the process of deciding on the best route towards the establishment of an enforceable conveyancing fee scale.Working parties? Isn't that, I hear you say, the traditional method of ensuring that nothing much happens? Some members of the Law Society's Council have told me that 'politeness does not signify agreement'.

Others have very politely said that they will look at each of my manifesto proposals (those so recently approved by the profession) with an open mind.

In some cases, I suspect, the intention is to examine each proposal impartially and then to reject each proposal impartially.

Let no one be under the illusion that I will allow that to happen.

If it does, we have Council elections next July and the profession will have the chance to take its revenge.

I urge all solicitors to take an interest in these elections.

Don't murmur and then do nothing.

Find out if your sitting member is really a supporter of the reform programme (and by reform I mean change which would actually make a difference to our prosperity).

If he is not, then I hope his seat will be contested.

The challenger would have maximum support from the Vice-President and myself.The working parties I have set up are there to produce results and to produce them quickly, not to act as talking shops.

The Solicitors Complaints Bureau also needs radical reform and I have produced detailed proposals -- again on the lines of the manifesto programme.

Here, likewise, I do not intend to allow the wishes of the profession to be politely brushed aside.