Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party has appealed to lawyers to help ensure its plans to reverse the Blair era’s constitutional reforms are watertight. A launch event for the 'Lawyers for Reform’ special interest group last night heard fears that moves to overturn the Human Rights Act and Constitutional Reform Act would run into establishment opposition.
’Incoming ministers in a Reform government are going to find they are hogtied by the legal system’, the group’s chairman, Martin Howe KC, told the event at the Law Society. 'This is why lawyers will have an absolutely crucial role in getting Reform into office with plans that are legally sound.' The group will support Reform campaigns by contributing expertise behind the scenes and speaking in public, he said.
Its first task will be 'outreach into the legal community'. Howe said the group would have an 'open door policy...we don't want to preach just to the already committed'.
While Reform policymakers have included the Legal Services Act in their hit-list of Blair reforms, Howe said legal services regulation would not be a priority for the group. 'Although we consist of lawyers, we are not a professional lobbying group,' he said last night.
Reform UK, which describes itself as Britain's fastest growing political party, has pledged to overturn the Constitutional Reform Act and Human Rights Act. Following its candidate's defeat in last month's Gorton and Denton by-election, its next major test will be the Welsh Senedd elections in May.
'If there is one mission for the Reform Party, it is to restore the foundations of our legal code, laws created in parliament and enforced by judges acting impartially,' Reform MP Danny Kruger, a defector from the Conservatives, told the event.
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