How the Tories have squeezed law and order

It is one of those stories today that should send alarm bells ringing but almost certainly won’t. The Financial Times has reported that the chair of the Bar Council, Sam Townend KC, is warning that England’s place as an international hub for corporate litigation and legal services is at risk.

We can add this to a long list of things that are at risk because this government knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

If you starve the courts of money, so that they are falling down, dirty, and unattractive, people are less likely to use them. If you starve the system of money so that there are endless delays or fewer lawyers, people notice and they go elsewhere. In the UK’s case this means risking one of our biggest assets, the quality, depth and reputation of our legal system, which brings in £43.7 billion a year, because you can’t find the money to keep the courts running smoothly.

We also learnt in the last week that Jaguar Land Rover (JLR ) is funding police investigations to the tune of millions of pounds because so many of its cars are being stolen and exported but the police don’t have the resources to patrol the ports. The crime spree is so bad that JLR is now running its own insurance arm for owners of its vehicles, commercial rates being increasingly prohibitive. Millions of pounds that could be invested is being spent to deal with the consequences of a lack of police. How many other firms are having to spend more on their own security, and on higher insurance fees?

Fraud, especially online fraud, is also on the rise; it is so bad the government leaves fraud out of the crime figures so it can lie about crime falling. Yet every successful fraudster undermines faith in a legitimate sector of the economy, damages honest firms and hampers business.

Underfunding the state has important consequences. There is an economic cost to a lack of law and order, to not enough judges, to lawyers put off by low pay and terrible work conditions, to not enough police and rising crime.

But like in so many other parts of our national life, this is something the Tory government just doesn’t get. You can say the same about the roads, rail, water quality, green measures, and a dozen others. People will only come and invest in your country if it is an attractive option – if things, especially the government, work well.

Especially after Brexit, the UK needs to make itself more attractive, not less, but the government continues with endless rounds of austerity and huge cuts to departmental budgets.

The legal sector is one of the few British world beating industries. It is an awful lot of money to put at risk, in order to save a few million a year in maintenance bills – bills that will have to be paid eventually and which increase with every delay.

But for this government that is the obvious thing to do because they have been brought up to believe that the state does nothing important, that it is a waste of money, a barrier to growth and a millstone around the neck of free enterprise. That only tax cuts matter.

Meanwhile the criminals are laughing all the way to the bank.