Mike Dailly, campaigning against the Legal Services bill, has challenged Community Safety Minister Fergus Ewing over his  defence of the Legal Services Bill, stating the outcomes proposed by the bill are "wrong in principle".

Ewing had said that the Bill "would not jeopardise a strong, independent, Scottish legal system", a claim Dailly says "must be wrong as a matter of logic."

"The bill would open up ownership of Scottish legal services to a worldwide market of investors and corporations, with consumer protection consisting of a risk-based licensing approach. Accordingly, notwithstanding how good the bill's proposed regulatory scheme claims to be, the fact it extends ownership and control of Scotland's legal services to a global market (of both legitimate and illegitimate interests) must mean the bill presents a real threat to Scottish consumer protection," Dailly argues.

"Any risk based regulatory system - no matter how good - accepts an element of harm and failure, and invariably detects serious consumer detriment after damage has been done. Just think of the current payment protection insurance scandal, or the various misselling of products scandals. Do we really want this approach for legal redress and justice within Scotland?

"Second, businesses and investors are seriously high risk compared to legal firms. It's a cultural thing. Risk taking is associated with higher financial returns, and even if you go bust, insolvency law encourages you to rise from the ashes as a pheonix: whereas if solicitors take risks, they end up struck off, with no re-birth. And rightly so. So conceptionally, this approach to legal services is wrong in principle - and we're not even talking about how weak and unworkable the bill's regulatory scheme is.

"Tellingly, neither European countries, nor the USA, are embracing the Scottish Government's deregulation of legal services model. Around the world, governments are tightening up their regulatory systems, so why are we acting so regressively in Scotland? Critics say solicitors have a 'monopoly' in Scotland, but it's a monopoly in the same way DVLA controls who can drive a car. And it's not true, as anyone can set up a body to provide representation in the courts under the Law Reform (Miscellenous Provisions) (Scotland) Act 1990.

"The truth is the Scottish Government's bill is based upon a deregulation or 'free for all' model from 2004. This was three years before the financial services meltdown from deregulation; an approach which has since been discredited and abandoned around the world. Yet Fergus Ewing and his colleagues clutch onto this flawed model because England did so in 2007?"