Legal professions 'should regulate themselves'
Reform UK politician Arron Banks has told the England and Wales Gazette that the whole Blair-era infrastructure of legal regulation will be swept away if his party gains power.
The politician and businessman, who this year lost the election for mayor of the West of England, has said his party, if elected, will follow the pattern of President Trump in the US.
“What I think is needed is a Big Beautiful Reform Bill at the beginning of the administration.
“We’re going to spend a couple of years framing the legislation and be ready to go on day one. It will involve repeal of most of the legislation of the past 20 years, wholesale,” he told the Gazette.
Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage has published a programme for government entitled ‘Operation Restoring Justice’, described as a five-year emergency plan to identify, detain, and deport illegal immigrants from Britain, and to deter any further build-up.
This will involve Britain leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, repealing the Human Rights Act and replacing it with a ‘British Bill of Rights’, and new primary legislation in the form of an ‘Illegal Migration (Mass Deportation) Bill’.
Banks stated that Britain’s criminal-justice system had “ground to a halt” and that the solution was “elimination of the Blair reforms, both in criminal and commercial law”.
“Of course there will be mistakes,” he said.
“But we can deal with those rather than turn [every summary trial] into a full production number. Criminal justice needs a return to a proper magistrates’ system where magistrates can revert to common sense.”
Currently, crimes in Britain went almost unpunished, he stated.
Banks condemned elite City ‘magic circle’ firms as “specialists on lawfare, making profits of 40% on turnover across the board, while the smaller rivals are being crushed to pieces”.
Curb abuses
His party would curb abuses, he stated.
He termed the expansion in collective action claims under competition law as “disgraceful, it’s just income generation for law firms.”
Citing the British Supreme Court’s car finance judgment, he asks: he asks: “Does the car buyer care about the arrangement between the dealer and the finance company? Who will pay for all this? It’s like watching a parade – if you stand on a chair to get a better view, soon pretty well everyone will be doing that. It is achieving nothing except clogging up the courts on something that shouldn’t be there.”
Banks also stated that: “Every immigration lawyer and judge is pro-immigration.”
Reform will also get rid of the Judicial Appointments Commission, and by implication the Sentencing Council, to give judges more professional freedom.
“We need to systematically undo 40 years of bad legislation. Let the judges be back in control,” Banks stated.
However, he added: “I think you’d have to keep the Supreme Court, now you’ve got it. You couldn’t go back to the House of Lords.”
He concluded that direct judicial elections were a possibility.
“That’s one thing that’s got to be looked at,’ he said. “You can’t have the judges wholly at odds with the views of the population. I’m not sure we have the answer to that, but there may very well be one by the time we hit the ground running.”
“The Legal Services Act will be one of the things we want to fix on day one,” he said.
Abolish SRA
“The SRA needs to be abolished post-haste. It couldn’t find an elephant in the room, but can find a cockroach in the skirting board. I can’t see how the SRA has in any shape or form improved the professional standards of lawyers,” he said.
Banks said he would trust the legal professions to regulate themselves, despite “rotten apples in every barrel”.
Reform UK’s party conference begins today (5 September), with the party holding an 11-point lead over incumbent Labour.