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We already have in the U.K. some of the most onerous obligations in the world concerning money laundering, but now the government is threatening us with even more dire consequences, if we don’t meet in the future new, even more onerous standards.

The government feels emboldened to turn the regulatory ratchet, since we are perceived as weak, and unlikely to fight back.

So, on the one hand the legal profession has been battered in recent years by anti-profession legislation, an overzealous regulator and the effects of an emasculated legal aid system, but the government stills expects us to become its quasi enforcers, against a background of their own damaging cuts to police budgets.

The Land Registry is also evolving, so that increasingly solicitors will become personally liable, for fraudulent movements on a digital title which ultimately they cannot fully police.

Clearly there is a pattern emerging, of the legal profession becoming statutory “gate keepers” and “quasi enforcers”, disrupting solicitor and client relationships and delaying transactions, despite the government claiming that post Brexit, it wants the UK to be open to the world for business.

When any government minister asserts that something needs to be done, professionals already weighed down by the toxic cocktail described above, should be afraid, very afraid, since this is another example of the need for solicitors desperately needing robust leadership, to counter the worst excesses of flawed policies.