There’s a common misapprehension among the twittering classes that ordinary working folk are as obsessed as they are with something called ‘access to justice.’ Sorry if this comes as a shock to bleeding-heart metropolitan liberals, but accessing justice is just about the last thing on the minds of decent ordinary Brits.
How dispiriting then to hear Daryl Gordon, self-styled president of Ambulance Pursuit Iniquity Lawyers (APIL) moaning on about how activation of the so-called Porthole (a key part of HMG’s War on Whiplash) should be delayed – because ‘it raises real issues in terms of access to justice.’
For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, the ‘Porthole’ is a special kind of digital thingamajig into which people can put whiplash claims and, if they’re lucky, get some money out the other end.
Time and again the British people have made it clear that it’s cheap car insurance they’re interested in – not this nebulous ‘access to justice’ that self-serving lawyers are so worked up about. But greedy legal types like Gordon just aren’t getting the message.
“If the reforms are going ahead,” he says (note that treacherous kicking-and-screaming ‘if’), “it has to be in a proper and considered manner’. Presumably the ‘proper and considered’ thing to do would be to stroke our chins indefinitely while every jumped-up nobody with a soft-tissue injury gets to fill their boots at the expense of decent ordinary motorists.
Taking system-playing lawyers out of the equation and forcing would-be whiplash weaponisers to post any claims they want to make though the Porthole will cut costs, deter casual chancers, and frighten off the faint-hearted.
Gordon questions patronisingly whether ‘lay people’ will be able to operate the Porthole’s ‘complex software’ and insists they’ll need advice. That’ll be advice his members would get paid to provide, presumably! If dozy punters don’t know how to work the Porthole – so much the better. That’s cheaper premiums for the rest of us!
So put a sock in it, you Whingeing Windbag! That’s what we say here at Bankstone News. No-one’s going to miss your unaffordable legal-advice-for-all socialist utopia. So sling your nasty hook and, frankly, do one Dearie!
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