Former BBC solicitor Alistair Bonnington laments the Law Society's 'cosying up' to politicians, and hails the opportunity presented by David Flint's motion at the forthcoming AGM as a chance to insist on a meaningful stance in the interests of its members.

Few of Scotland’s 10,000 or so solicitors take much interest in their Law Society. The sparse attendance at the AGM and SGMs, and the positively embarrassingly tiny numbers who came to last month’s 60th anniversary conference are clear indicators of almost total apathy.

But even this huge majority of uninterested solicitors can hardy have failed to notice that the Society has been seriously at sea in the past decade. It stood vigorously and publicly against the removal of any of its regulatory functions to an independent body, despite the obvious conflict of interest created by the status quo. In fact, I can tell you that just a few years back the then CEO of the Society went into an incandescent rage when the Journal (where I assisted editorially) had the temerity to print Euan Kennedy’s article in which he stated that the roles of (1) representative of the profession and (2) guardian of the public against the profession were impossible to reconcile. The Society has never been a fan of free speech.

As we all know, the Society, like Paul of Tarsus, had a sudden and dramatic conversion. Suddenly Euan Kennedy and those who thought like him were quite right and had been right all along.

This spectacle made it painfully obvious that the Council of the Society were unclear as to their proper function - a rather fundamental difficulty for any organisation. If I were asked to apply adjectives to the Council’s approach to issues in the past decade I’m afraid I would have to choose ‘laborious’, ‘inept’, and ‘fearful.’ Maybe it is inevitable that such bodies are not exactly fleet of foot, but their review of education and training now looks as if it will take longer to complete than it took to build the Scottish Parliament. The exercise in trying to sell Drumsheugh Gardens at the time when the property market was diving like a Stukka bomber would have been adjudged as downright daft by a first year conveyancing trainee. This I believe wasted £100,000 of our money. Someone should take responsibility for this idiocy. Most important of my three adjectives is “fearful”, which describes the Society’s lickspittle approach to Scottish politicians and their civil servants. The Society, both at Council and management level, hasn’t a clue how to deal with such creatures. I had to deal with them on and off for a period of 16 years when I was the BBC’s solicitor in Scotland. Politicians bully and lie continuously. They are interested primarily in themselves and their political party. To take what such people say as representing the public interest is simply naïve.

Now the only way to deal with politicians is to treat them like dirt. They are usually people of low or no morals and they know it. They think that anyone who fails to see that this is so is a fool and can be taken advantage of. In dealing with them I found that if you make it clear you hold them in very low esteem and don’t accept what they say as the truth, they will behave tolerably – like a 14 year old child as opposed to a two year old having a tantrum. That’s about as good as it gets, I’m afraid.

The Law Society doesn’t take my approach. It kowtows to these creeps. Inevitably, it gets kicked all over the place as a consequence. Last year I spoke at the SGM, trying to persuade the council to refuse to force solicitors who would never be subject to the new Scottish Legal Complaints Commission’s jurisdiction to pay the first annual levy. The Council’s response was that the point I made was quite correct -there was a breach of a fundamental democratic principle in the legislation- but they would do nothing about it. Their previous pathetic requests to the SLCC and the mega-minds of the Scottish Executive had got nowhere. What a surprise! The obvious course of the Society challenging this provision in the courts was just too scary, after all, the Scottish Executive might be upset. How unthinkable.

So it seems to me that the Society, even today after the removal of part of its regulatory function to the SLCC, still hasn’t a clue as to how to fulfil its prime purpose of being a representative body for Scottish solicitors.

Now, all of this has been hugely exacerbated over the past two years by a President whose legal experience has been restricted to a lifetime as a civil servant in Scotland. I hope he will not be too offended by my pointing out that he has no practical working knowledge of the conflicts of interest which the rest of us have to deal with regularly in professional life. Such leadership -the Council’s fault entirely- at such a crucial time for the profession has been a disaster. A policy of appeasement has been pursued with the Scottish Executive –solicitors in effect going as supplicants to people who intellectually and morally are uncannily reminiscent of our criminal clients. Inevitably this misguided approach has led to politicians taking advantage of solicitors at every turn.

The title I give to these few thoughts is the kernel of what I try to say here. In light of recent events, what is the Law Society now for?

That matter is possibly to be debated at the AGM on 28 May when the motion of David Flint of MacRoberts is proposed. The SLCC has quite outrageously started ‘work’ at a time when it has nothing to do, precisely because of its own decision to accept complaints based on facts which arise after 1 October 2008. This irresponsible action has led to hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money (for setup costs) being wasted along with the money contributed by the legal profession in the form of a levy. All of which is sadly typical of the wastage of money in ‘civic Scotland’, the adulatory term used now by the Law Society for the collection of second rate profligate people in our executive and its subservient quangos. David Flint’s proposal is that the annual practising certificate fee for a Scottish Solicitor take account of the levy the SLCC take from each solicitor. Put simply, the price of the regulator and the representative bodies together should not wildly exceed what was paid when these functions were both carried out entirely by the Law Society. They should live within a budget, just like the rest of us.

I will close with an illustrative tale from the Lockerbie trial at Kamp Van Zeist in Holland about nine years ago. As usual I had been helping BBC journalists with the output from the court, being regularly interviewed in my capacity as criminal procedure lecturer at Glasgow University. Having been standing freezing outside the courtroom for many hours my famously sunny disposition had faded somewhat. At this point I got a phone call form the Law Society who were in a complete panic becasue fo the terms of an article I had written in the Journal (with no byline). In that article I had suggested that the decision as to whether to prosecute First Minister Henry McLeish for the crime of fraud over his expenses claims should be taken by someone other than the Lord Advocate or Crown office because of their conflict of interest under the new Scottish constitutional setup, in which the Lord Advocate was a cabinet member appointed by the First Minister. ‘Scotland on Sunday ’had mischievously or incompetently said the article was editorial, and the Law Society were clearly terrified that such heretical thoughts might be attributed to them. It was plain to me that the Society happy to sell me down the river to protect its hard earned reputation as Government lickspittle. What a degrading approach for a professional body to take.

The present public opinion of most politicians as self seeking egotistical cheats is nothing new. Many journalists interviewing the person in the street in the past few days has been told, “I’m not surprised, I always thought they were dishonest”. All the research we carried out when I was at the BBC showed that voters found politicians as a breed quite repulsive. They asked for political programmes to be broadcast without politicians on them. Try explaining that to your average self important MP.

The current clamour for a Parliament minus most of its present MPs may be duplicated in the case of the Law Society of Scotland. An allegedly representative body which in the immediate past has so signally failed in carrying out that function and instead has cosied up to politicians should now answer to its members. David Flint’s motion gives the membership the opportunity to insist on a new and meaningful stance for its Society. It should be grasped with both hands.

Alistair