Jack Straw is an idiot

I once had the opportunity to stick a leg out and trip up Jack Straw as he, clad in sweaty vest and shiny shorts, and his close protection officers jogged past over Westminster bridge. It is a missed chance that I regret, if not daily then more and more often. Today being a case in point.

In an apparent attempt at rabble rousing, fearless Jack announced to the Labour conference that:

I am concerned about ‘no win, no fee’ arrangements, it’s claimed they have provided greater access to justice but the behaviour of some lawyers in ramping up their fees in these cases is nothing short of scandalous.

That would be why your extremely recent review of CFAs made no significant changes, eh Jack?

Then Spring-heeled Jack went on:

There are now three times as many lawyers in private practice but paid for by the taxpayer as there were three decades ago; the budget has grown faster than the health and education services. The challenge now is how better to spend these huge sums in the interests of justice; something I want to do with the legal profession and local government.

Oh, no, Jack, not those blood sucking legal aid lawyer leeches again. Firstly, I doubt these figures. Come on, show us the figures for private practice solicitors ‘paid for’ (paid a bit, wholly, or what?) by the tax payer over the last three decades to support this claim.

Secondly, if Jack is right about these teeming hordes of legal aid lawyers, one has to ask which way are they more likely to vote? My guess is that legal aid lawyers would tend to be labour voters. So at exactly the moment when labour needs every vote it can get, Jack choses to have a go at a professional group of labour voters. Just a stroke of brilliance.

Given that labour policy has generated a huge new demand for legal aid lawyers, what with just about everything being a serious criminal offence nowadays, Jack appears to lack the new labour understanding that they don’t do supply side economics these days, it is all about internal markets.

Labour criminal policy and criminal legal aid are a near perfect model of the symbiosis of public delivery and private practice, such that the NHS should be taking notes. But that means dancing to the provider’s tune, as any NHS manager will tell you. Of course, if you want very publicly adjourned trials, Jack…