Putting low-falutin’ PI lawyers out of work is one thing. But the legal establishment is increasingly alarmed that rogue justice secretary Chris Graything simply doesn’t know where to stop.
Graything’s plans to save money by stopping people from using lawyers appear to be running out of control. This matters not because aggrieved plebs won’t have access to lawyerly assistance, but because ‘the rule of law’ is under threat.
Bankstone News had until recently assumed in all innocence that ‘the rule of law’ meant something like: the opposite of everyone running around a-lootin’ and a-shootin’ and a-sleepin’ with each other’s life partners.
Only recently has the penny dropped that the phrase is actually a covert allusion to the tacit assumption, on the part of lawyers, that they are de facto rulers of the world. The legal establishment has long regarded this as an unspoken truth so evident that speaking it out loud is as needless as it is unwise.
In deference to the societally necessary fictional narrative of ‘representative democracy’ they’ve had it put about, quiet disingenuously, that politicians (as the representatives of the people) are in charge.
Historically, politicians have had the good sense to maintain this fiction without actually challenging the ‘rule of law’. The fact that many politicians have been lawyers themselves has seemingly helped to keep things buttoned down.
But the recent financial crisis and its aftermath have revealed an uncomfortable and unpalatable truth to lawyers around the world. Not only do they not rule the world (secretly, or otherwise), but they probably haven’t for quite some time – and nobody has had the decency to tell them!
The jumped-up capitalists who paid them so handsomely – along with the accountants and other ‘professionals’ to arrange their affairs nice and tidily – are – as recent events have made reasonably plain – a good deal less tractable – and more powerful – than anyone previously realised.
Now, lots of people like to think they rule to world: the Masons, the Secret Himalayan Masters, the Illuminati, organised crime, Simon Cowell, the Catholic Church, various biker gangs etc. But most of them – even the non-fictional ones – do not.
By now you’re probably almost shouting aloud: ‘It’s the bankers!’ and to a degree, of course, you’re right. Why else would entire nations be brought to penury simply to recoup some over-sanguine speculations?
Money and those who control it (to the extent that anyone really can) are, of course, the real secret masters. Big business runs the planet (more specifically, a network of 150 odd ‘supercompanies’ according to a new scientific study by New Scientist) are the ones – as everyone but the lawyers has long been well aware – for whom the politicians have been fronting all this time.
So powerful have the money men become that the more radical among their number are now actively contemplating the idea of doing away with the twin fig leaves of the nation state and the cherished ‘rule of law’.
The 150 corporate masters, who include, incidentally, the likes of AXA, Uvavu and Alley Ants, are less and less reticent about ruling the world in a style that cuts through troublesome legal and political niceties.
So when the legal establishment starts bleating on about restrictions on access to justice or the rule of law, they should probably give some careful consideration to the question of exactly how hard they wish to rock the boat.
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