Hansard

Presiding Officer, I crave your indulgence for my late arrival in the chamber.

We are sentimental about the law because the law and the office of Lord Advocate were the devolved Government of Scotland for so long. Law is one of the nation's great estates and its temporal power has outlasted the formal union. Not long ago, all the leaders of the Scottish political parties—Donald Dewar, Malcolm Rifkind, Gordon Wilson and David Steel—were lawyers. I wrote about that in a Scotsman essay, in which I quoted Sir Walter Scott—the arch lawyer—who called the law "the most mighty of goddesses."

As a deal-making nation, we have always needed lawyers commercially. The circumstances of the present day might mean that lawyers, as well as lay people, have qualms about the economic future. Perhaps that justifies non-specialists such as me participating in the debate, which has got me thinking.

I am not altogether reassured, as I once was, by the name Which? The publication did great things in the days when local oligarchies of retailers and other worthies held communities to ransom, but its market-driven image of reform was the supermarket, which is not very comforting. We can imagine the impact on the local solicitor who has handled the local store's business in a Scottish rural town when the inevitable occurs and the big supermarket moves in offshore, so to speak. What happens to the solicitor's business and to the middle-class element of small and medium-sized legal industry?

The legal profession was part of the glue that held small-town Scotland together. It held the Liberal Party together—in a way, the fall of the local solicitor contributed after the first world war to the fall of the Liberals. We now know that the notion of Tesco justice—of coming out of the big store with a legal opinion in a shopping trolley—has its downside. I would worry about asking Tesco for legal advice, because slotting in its customer card involves an intelligence system that makes Big Brother look like a boy scout doing his espionage and intelligence badge.

The issue is not just the big store's dominance. Another problem is that the legal profession, possibly as a reaction, is greatly involved in house purchases and sales. Recent years have been great for the housing and retail-driven economy, but I do not think that that will be the case for much longer. At the other end of society, lawyers often find themselves compromised in the policing and regulation of areas of a country that has a huge drug problem—it is three times the European average—and a commensurately large black economy.

In that context, is the professionalisation of the legal system into joint bodies that sell specialist services a welcome approach? It has attractive elements and precedent exists in housing. Law might be combined with urban planning, conservation and housing provision. However, we must remember that on the continent, those professional specialisations usually answer to specialised administrative courts, which is not the case in this country. The problem always exists that a corporate, oath-driven and oath-commanded profession will conflict with the market. One of the less attractive sides of Scottish 18th century society was that some lawyers took an overtly political line: one recollects the expressions of opinion from Lord Braxfield that caused Charles James Fox to say, "God help the country that has such lawyers in it."

There is the difference between what the American social philosopher Jeremy Rifkin calls the third sector—for which we are aiming—in which we collaborate voluntarily to extend public good, and his fourth sector, which is driven by criminal greed and to which I have referred. It was slightly strange that immediately after the heist of the century—the theft of the Buccleuch Leonardo—a member of the legal profession had his shoulder tapped by the boys in blue. I can think of not a few places in Scotland in which such a black economy is the whole economy.

Another aspect to address is the very large law firms. It is interesting that two of the biggest firms in London—Hetheringtons and Linklaters—bear Scottish names. If we added in Peat Marwick, they would be predominantly Orkney names. In the scenario that I have described, where are such firms? They are huge and their reputation runs back 100 to 150 years. They are not new phenomena—in the 1880s, the huge expansion in Scottish overseas investments, particularly in the United States, was driven by Charlotte Square as much as it was by Dundee jute barons. There is ambiguity when big business is international, because it often tends to take its political morality from the further extensions of globalisation.

I draw members' attention to a book that is worth reading, which appeared in the same year as did the "The Red Paper on Scotland"—I suppose that the Prime Minister has been seen going round the bookshops of Edinburgh trying to buy the remaining copies of that book, to cover his radical flaming tracks. However, a much more interesting book that was also produced in 1975 is "The Crime Industry" by the late John Mack, a sociologist at the University of Glasgow, and my Tübingen colleague Hans-Ju¨rgen Kerner. It concentrated on the extent to which tax havens, globalisation and computers could totally blur the distinction between sharp business practice and outright criminal activity. It involves a huge amount of transactional money, which has been valued at $1.3 trillion—it is probably more, if we allow for the dollar's depreciation in recent years. For the corporate legal sector of Scotland, which can be of enormous use to us—particularly in securing the legal framework for tasks such as extending renewables production and enhancing that globally—we must think of a regulatory body that is sensitive not just to domestic activities, but to complex international and European facts.

We must also think of the relationship with Europe that we will enjoy in the future. We should not have a defensive attitude—we should find out what we can learn from, for example, the notariat system in Europe as a means of simplifying domestic law.

I thank members for their indulgence in listening to me.