Please sir, may we have some more?

Reader's letter from today's City AM:

[RE: Cameron unveils "family test" for government policy, Monday]

David Cameron insists that families should be at the heart of everything politicians do.

But apart from making provision for "problem families" and impact assessments, he didn't say what the government could do now to make things better.

The first area that springs to mind is the effect of removing legal aid from family law cases.

Second, and somewhat ironically given the Prime Minister's keenness to retain a United Kingdom, why does Scotland have such beneficial provision for the rights of cohabitess, but England and Wales do not?

Finally, in order to speed up the process whereby separating couples can make a clean break, why not offer legal aid for family law arbitration?

Marylin Stowe, senior partner, Stowe Family Law.

Ha!

Once I'm in charge I'll put all of these vultures and bottom feeders out of business by introducing statutory default prenup/divorce rules (like so many other European countries), which kick in if couples have not made their own private agreement.

There's a Laffer curve of everything - make the rules too favourable to women and men won't get married; make them too favourable to men and women won't get married. So you can tell whether the statutory rules are "about right" if the maximum number of people get married and the minimum number of people get divorced.

Sorted.

That whole "curbing legal aid" thing

There are some useful stat's on who shares the £2 billion spent on legal aid in today's Daily Mail.

According to the legal profession - and some of the people whose representation was paid for by Legal Aid - Legal Aid is vital because it helps people achieve "justice". But then they would say that, wouldn't they?


Now, the whole legal system in this country only has tangentially to do with some notions of "fairness" or "justice". In practice it is there to protect the wealthy and to provide lawyers with a ready source of income - there's no point being a tip top commercial lawyer drafting business contracts if there is no court system to enforce it. By analogy, if there were no organised football league, you wouldn't be able to earn money by playing football.

It is, for example, perfectly easy to imagine a system where there are no commercial courts to enforce business contracts. Businesses would either behave fairly to their employees and customers and compensate them where appropriate in order to preserve their goodwill and reputation or they would go out of business fairly quickly.

Apparently, it is not the done thing in Japan for large companies to sue each other for breach of contract (and apparently they don't even bother having detailed contracts in the first place), either they settle out of court or the injured party just refuses to deal with the other party ever again. Word soon gets around who's dealing honourably and who isn't.

And the whole criminal justice thing is a bit of a joke as punishments seem to be inversely proportional to the severity of the crime committed and all this Human Rights malarkey has gone way too far.

So the legal profession as a whole is one massive great rent-seeking enterprise, and the £2 billion Legal Aid they receive is just another subsidy on top. To ensure that outsiders don't grab a slice, entry to the profession is of course strictly regulated and restricted and there is a heck of a lot of nepotism.

As readers ought to be aware by now, I'm against all rent-seeking and subsidy payments and I'm also against taxes on output, employment and earned income, but a tax on rental income (like the bulk of the income of the legal profession) merely serves to claw back some of those subsidies.

So here's a bright idea - the total turnover/gross income of legal services is said to be £26.8 billion a year, so if the lawyers decide that £2 billion or £3 billion should be spent on Legal Aid each year, we could fund that with a flat tax of about ten per cent on their gross income and the problem sorts itself out. There's no reason we can't fund the entire court system with such a tax, to be honest, it's like making footballers pay for the upkeep of the football grounds out of their own wages (which ultimately they do).