Editorial: Is there a doctor in the house?

Spare a thought for your English colleagues this week who had to listen to the first pronunciamento from their new Justice Minister, Michael Gove.

Fresh from his triumph in sorting out England’s ailing schools, Gove, an Aberdonian hack to trade, has been parachuted in to oversee England’s creaking justice system.

Not that I am suggesting you have to be a lawyer to be a justice minister — legions of Scottish lawyers heaved a huge sigh of relief when their colleague Kenny MacAskill was replaced by occupational therapist Michael Matheson as Justice Secretary. In fact, many felt in urgent need of therapy after seven years of our Kenny.

I have a vague recollection of Gove as a young reporter on the Press and Journal during their strike of 1989 when he gave a reasonable impression of being a precocious popinjay, just as he did this week when he advised English lawyers to work for nothing and expand their already not inconsiderable pro bono activities.

I cannot imagine that this was the kind of advice he dispensed to his colleagues on the P&J picket line but the Tories have a curious obsession with encouraging other people to volunteer.

Does anyone remember David Cameron’s short-lived vision of the “Big Society”? It may all stem from rose-tinted images of college-scarved undergraduates helping to break the General Strike of 1926 or of the redoubtable ladies of the WRVS handing out mugs of tea and bacon sandwiches to the bedraggled survivors of Dunkirk as they staggered down the gangplanks.

The aristocracy also has a strong attachment to having people “volunteer” their services for their benefit. They called it serfdom and it didn’t do the serfs any harm at all. As a PR consultant for one of Scotland’s most palatial of stately homes I once had first-hand experience of this attitude. When I suggested that we could create a photo opportunity out of the staff polishing up the kitchen’s vast copper pan collection in anticipation of the new visiting season, the Countess had a better idea. “Why not do a story asking the local ladies to volunteer to do the polishing?” she suggested. It was the sort of remark that has Madame Defarge reaching for her knitting and wee Nicola checking the small print of the Land Reform Bill.

But still it goes on. Even after the embarrassing failure of the Big Society idea, Gove beats the drum for volunteering – blithely ignoring the fact that most solicitors are too busy trying to make a living and that the junior criminal bar in England, as in Scotland, is in the direst of straits. Perhaps he has a vision of a sort of legal Dad’s Army of retired solicitors being dragged off their golf courses and out of their potting sheds to save the day. We can all think of candidates to be Captain Mainwaring and Corporal Jones could deal with the Law Society complaints (“Don’t panic! Don’t panic!”)

To be fair, the left also get caught up in the volunteering nonsense. In the former Soviet Union citizens were expected to regularly work for the state for a day. It was called a “subbotnik” and was as voluntary as a trip to the Gulag Archipelago and as enjoyable as a Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. I once witnessed a farcical attempt to introduce this concept in Cuba. The compañeros and compañeras turned up for a hard day’s labour in the cane fields armed with guitars and bottles of rum. After a couple of hours of cursory flailing with machetes the party started and, as the strains of the Samba caught the tropical air, couples disappeared into the cane field. One “volunteer” grinned, “I am a machiste-leninist. I do not drink, I do not smoke but I do the third thing that all the Cubans do.”

I tell this tale merely to illustrate the futility of coerced volunteering. But presumably Gove knows all of this. What he was really doing was playing to the gallery and stoking up public loathing of lawyers in the process. It is a useful tool when cutting legal aid budgets and is the profession’s Achilles heel. If the respect agenda was ever extended to the professions there would be prosecutions for lawyer-hatred crime every week.

Gove’s equivalent in the crisis-stricken NHS would never dream of asking over-paid GPs to volunteer – because they are popular. I do not expect that Scottish doctors will volunteer their services to the NHS – they certainly charge enough to the Scottish Legal Aid Board for them.

Does anyone really believe that the reports, opinions and consultations doctors charge for are done in their own time? I very much doubt it – it is fair to speculate that the public purse is being clobbered to pay doctors twice for their services. If that is indeed the case, it is a scandal and a disgrace at a time when the legal aid budget is slashed to the bone.

Today, Scottish Legal News has asked SLAB to reveal just how much they pay medical witnesses each year. Then we can put the figures before the public and invite the doctors to volunteer their services, or, at any rate, just accept one payment rather than two.

Graham Ogilvy

Editor