Rise of the juristocracy

Who should we get to sort out our venal and cavalier bankers? It’s an interesting question. The Labour party wishes to inflict upon them a plague of lawyers, to use Jeremy Bentham’s apt expression, presided over by some bewigged and self-regarding judge. A judicial inquiry, then, which will end up costing the equivalent of a whole bunch of bankers bonuses and then some. The argument seems to be that the government, in preferring the inquiry to be carried out by parliamentarians, is affording the matter too little seriousness. Select committees are all well and good for the minor stuff, but such is the public outrage on this particular matter that the inquiry should be carried out at a higher level, a level beyond parliament. The body which makes the laws is not good enough, it lacks import; paradoxically, it is easily trumped by the body which does its bidding by administering those laws.

If you were looking for a tacit admission of the declining power of parliament and MPs, then here it is. If you were looking for more evidence that we now live in a juristocracy, rather than a parliamentary democracy, then here it is. 

It is an odd position for the Labour party to take, ideologically, you might think; as Jeremy Bentham again argued, why should we prefer the opinion of the few to that of the many? If the public is enraged by the bankers then it should surely be the properly elected representatives of the public who channel that generalised disquiet into some sort of specific and I daresay ineffectual action. What do the judges represent, other than the pinnacle of a remote, elitist, self-serving, privileged, over-remunerated and vaultingly ambitious profession? And yet it is quite possible, if not probable, that the public might be on Labour’s side in this argument; somehow, inexplicably, judges and lawyers are respected by the general population.