From the PM downwards, this is a government dominated by the legal profession. So why is it so keen to attack ancient liberties?
In Henry VI, Part Two, Shakespeare shows Jack Cade's peasant army gathering on Blackheath to march on London. Cade promises a utopia when the feudal order is overthrown. "There shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny . . . and I will make it a felony to drink small beer. All the realm shall be in common . . . all shall eat and drink on my score . . ." Growing tired of this list of what we would now call infantile leftist demands, Dick, the butcher, puts a more practical policy to his leader. The language of peasant revolt is the language of priorities, and cheap bread and good beer must wait until resources allow an easing of fiscal constraints. When the rebels take the capital, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers".
Dick's perennially popular battle cry has never had a greater urgency. Lawyers are no longer content to be solid members of the upper middle class, but are plumping the ranks of the super-rich. According to the Lawyer magazine, 61 partners in City law firms now scrape by on salaries of £1m or more. The same firms have earned their fees by ensuring that the new Human Rights Act has prevented the effective prosecution of City frauds. The act itself draws lawyers to the centre of national life, making them as grand as MPs, if not grander.
Against them is Jack Straw, the modern-day Jack Cade. He has vowed to slay the parasitical elite, those "BMW-driving civil liberties lawyers" whose wealth and presumption have propelled them to oppose his slashing of the right to trial by jury. In Tribune last month, Straw wrote that he would never surrender to the toffs who, when they weren't lolling behind the wheels of luxury cars, were carping at him from the benches of the House of Lords, where they enjoyed the privilege of being "unelected lawyer peers".
Only carpers and cynics attack the working-class hero. A few develop the principled case that Straw has nothing against City law firms or plutocratic barristers, but uses the language of democracy to attack the democratic right of citizens to sit on juries and judge the guilt or innocence of their neighbours. Others merely reply: "But you are a bloody lawyer, you irredeemable humbug."
Straw trained as a barrister in the Seventies and was introduced to the trade by the Inns of Court. He is not the only brief in Whitehall. Tony Blair and Cherie Booth are barristers. Their old pupil master, Lord Irvine, is Lord Chancellor. Lord Falconer, the Cabinet Office minister and one of the most powerful members of the government, befriended Blair when they were young legal hacks. Alistair Darling is a member of the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh. Geoff Hoon is a former barrister. Stephen Byers was a lecturer in law. If you want to see the power of the profession, look at who is invited to Chequers or Downing Street, or who is given the delicate task of impoverishing welfare claimants who live on less a week than a top silk can make in ten minutes.
There is nothing novel about lawyers in office - law and politics have always been affectionate bedfellows. What is both paradoxical and stunning is that an administration of lawyers is destroying the basic protections of British and, in particular, English law. It is as if a government of doctors were poisoning the wells.
The assault is being mounted with relish and self-pity. To Lord Williams of Mostyn, the Attorney-General, it was not only civil liberties lawyers who were elitists, but the citizenry itself. He told the Lords that when the swinish multitude asked for trial by jury, they were not making a request that was once so much a matter of course in England that it barely needed to be articulated, but were issuing a "diktat" to the courts. The state was the victim of abuse. The populace were imperious tyrants.
Lord Irvine's first act after being elevated to the Lord Chancellorship by his protege was to assault the poorest dictators in the country. Legal aid was shredded. Civil liberties lawyers confronted Hoon, who was Irvine's deputy before he became Defence Secretary. They told him that his alternative - the American no-win, no-fee system - would leave the working class without redress if substantiating their complaints required hard legal work. Lawyers would need insurance against defeat before accepting a client. But no insurer would take on a young black man, for example, who claimed he had been beaten up by the police. Hoon replied with a sneer: his critics were legal fat cats looking to line their pockets. His audience, most of whom could not afford a BMW, went wild. "The real fat cats are in Downing Street," they bellowed.
Indeed they are. Irvine made a fortune at the commercial bar. He didn't represent impecunious proles, but the likes of Mohamed Fayed. Twelve years ago, he pocketed a £1m fee from Hong Kong businessmen - reputedly the first seven-figure brief for a British barrister in legal history.
With legal aid gone, new Labour's lawyers chiselled the right to sanctuary by making it impossible for an asylum-seeker to travel to Britain legally. When the Conservatives - that's right, the Conservatives - complained that he was making refugees risk their lives as stowaways in container ships and transcontinental lorries, Hoon replied that he found their humane objections "tedious".
Darling is a quieter fellow. While the bluster of Straw, Irvine and Hoon makes them sound like reactionary barristers browbeating a witness, the Social Security Secretary apes the diligent country solicitor. For all his mousiness, he is at one with his loud-mouthed colleagues. This year, he proposed that offenders on probation should lose their benefits if they are accused of breaking court orders. Darling is fighting a class war - ex-criminals who have found work or live on a private income will not be punished - and asserting that an accusation of impropriety should be enough to reduce a man to penury. A court will not have to be convinced that the luckless suspect is guilty. Not to be outdone, Straw has insisted that shady-looking characters with suspiciously large bank accounts must prove that they came by their wealth legally, rather than require the prosecution to prove beyond reasonable doubt that they did not.
The presumption of innocence, trial by jury, sanctuary, as well as the double jeopardy principle that you cannot be tried for the same crime twice, are either disappearing or are under threat. Worst affected by the bonfire of the liberties will be confused or weird-looking souls who are deemed to be antisocial elements. On the authority of practitioners trained in the pseudo-science of psychiatry, an unproven and unprovable "antisocial" propensity to violence will be enough to have them locked up without trial, even though they have not, in fact, committed a crime.
How has it come to pass that new Labour lawyers have lost their bottom lines and last ditches, and found a patricidal hatred of the principles that nurtured them? The simple explanation is that apostasy comes easily to lawyers. You are judged at the Bar by your ability to argue a case - any case. If Blair, Straw and Williams condemned restrictions on trial by jury in opposition and then promoted them in government, they have behaved no differently from barristers on the cab rank, who will prosecute or defend any brief providing the fare can be met.
Attractive though the familiar condemnations of lawyerly amorality are, they are not good enough on this occasion. Irvine's millions are more suggestive. Lawyers are not a unified caste. The legally aided criminal barrister in Hackney, dealing with the conflicts and miseries of life in the slums in front of juries, has nothing in common, socially or professionally, with the £1m tax specialist in a City partnership a few miles away, who may not see the inside of a court from one year to the next.
Life in the partnerships seems the sweeter, but there was one great worry. Partners enjoyed light taxation and could conduct their affairs in secret. Yet, if a partner made a colossal blunder, he would bring everyone down with him. Partners were like the "names" who put their money into Lloyds insurance: their liability was unlimited. If disaster struck - a huge compensation claim for negligent advice, say, or a second BCCI scandal - partners could have lost every penny they owned. For years, the City firms such as Clifford Chance, and accountancy partnerships such as Ernst & Young, lobbied for limited liability. New Labour has granted it, while allowing them to continue to enjoy the tax advantages of being self-employed. Nor will they be burdened with the same obligations as directors of limited companies. Instead, the government will allow them to be members of limited liability partnerships - a hybrid, some would say bastard, form. "I still can't believe that a Labour Party with so much to do has bent over backwards to give these people the best of both worlds," said Austin Mitchell, the leader of a small band of Labour rebels.
The government may resent the spectre of the civil liberties lawyer in his BMW, but it dotes on and feels the pain of the commercial lawyer in his Rolls-Royce.
Delineating the creation of a corporate welfare state for the fattest legal cats exposes the cant behind new Labour's populism. But it does not explain the destructive glee of Irvine, Straw and the rest. Bob Marshall-Andrews, a Labour MP and QC, is unimpressed by the divisions between the commercial and criminal. He explains the hatred of the law's safeguards, which goes way beyond the indifference of a commercial lawyer, with a more basic distinction. "All lawyers can be divided into natural prosecutors and natural defenders," he says.
Like Claud Cockburn, who split humanity into Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards, or Jessica Mitford, who pitted the Hons against the Rebs, Marshall-Andrews sees the difference between prosecutors and defenders as a question of character, rather than ideology or professional role-playing.
Defenders are wary of the claims of state, church or party to perpetual indulgence. They believe that no institution can claim the right to lie or persecute in the name of the greater good: fiat iustitia et ruant coeli (let justice be done though the heavens fall), as they say. Prosecutors place the protection of state, church or party above all else. If lying and persecution are necessary to protect the established order or guarantee administrative convenience, then so be it.
"In all conflicts from Nazi Germany to South Africa under apartheid, prosecutors and defenders fought each other," says Marshall-Andrews. "Unfortunately, we have a government of prosecutors, anxious to make life easier for the state. Shakespeare didn't get it quite right. What he should have written was, 'the first thing we do, let's kill half the lawyers'."
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