There was a point during the barristers' strike when I realised that Dominic Raab simply would not relent, whatever the consequences to him, to us, to justice. We were playing chicken with someone who was not only prepared to crash the criminal justice system but actually seemed determined to do so. It's a little observed point but Liz Truss' pettish dismissal of him and replacement with the 1 month Lord Chancellor, Brandon Lewis, saved us from something genuinely cataclysmic. The truly sobering question is whether, in fact, being dynamited from the foundations up might have been preferable to death by a 1,000 agonising cuts. If it's to be oblivion there's at least something to be said for immediacy.
There have been so many 21st century Lord Chancellors that being able to name them all in order would probably qualify as a Mastermind subject. Justice is supposed to be immutable and enduring; those charged with supervising its administration have been anything but. Indeed, if you were to measure ministerial prestige by the longevity of Cabinet office holders it would be fair to say that, in political terms at least, justice is about as inconsequential as it gets. Not so much 'always the bridesmaid never the bride' as NFI to the wedding in the first place.
I'm certain I'm not alone in being slightly embarrassed at how absurd my forlorn hope was that a change of government might have heralded even the slightest prospect of improvement. Instead, less than 100 days into a Labour government we were told that court sitting days would be cut. If you don't know what a court sitting day is it will suffice to say that the Lord Chancellor's main job is ensuring there are sufficient courts open to ensure that we have a criminal justice system rather than a criminal justice swamp.
One might have thought that having a former Director of Public Prosecutions as Prime Minister would mean that a power hose would be turned on the Augean Stables that passes for our criminal justice system. Instead, as The Who sang in Won't Get Fooled Again, it's 'Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss'. The Independent, The Daily Telegraph and The Financial Times have all in the last few days published articles shining a light on how dire things have become. There was once a time when that would have caused Westminster to sit up and take notice. Now it's chip paper before the day's even out.
When I started at the Bar I did a little extradition work and one of the arguments sometimes advanced against extraditing to a particular country was that its system was so bad and its prisons so appalling that it would be a fundamental breach of human rights to permit extradition there. That argument was successfully deployed in Germany in 2023 against extradition to the UK. The envy of the world...
Here is a list of things I now regularly encounter:
1. Trials being listed in 2026 and 2027
2. Bail applications with no instructions
3. Cases listed for PTPH with no indictment or evidence served
4. Startlingly inexperienced officers investigating serious cases
5. Cases removed from the list administratively with no new date which then become zombie cases
6. Fixtures which become floaters
One was a time that any one of those scenarios would have been as unthinkable as it was unacceptable. Now the intolerable is tolerated, every day, and the unacceptable is utterly unexceptional.
I am starting to wonder whether the situation is actually capable of remedy. Only a fantasist could imagine that vast injections of cash are waiting around the corner. But are we passengers on a plane that is already in a terminal nosedive which no sum of money can arrest?
Any country can pretend at justice and I don't doubt that people can be found that will sign up for the pretending. I'm just not sure I'm one of them.
