Bar's metropolitan mindset

THERE are costs as well as benefits to the unbroken continuities of English history. The only monarch to be executed was Charles I nearly 350 years ago, there has been no revolution in more than 300 years, and few cataclysmic defeats.

In short, few of the events which, among our continental neighbours, have forced a comprehensive rethink and a fresh start. In consequence our institutions have evolved over time, changing by accretion rather than according to some overarching vision.

Which leaves the observer inclined to echo that most useless of traffic directions: "I wouldn't start from here if I were you," in looking at a number of them.

We retain a legislature whose Upper House is, numerically at least, dominated by inheritance rather merit, much less popular election. Our constitutional monarchy has, through sweeping application of the Crown prerogative by an over-powerful executive, been detrimental to the constitution. And a legal system, intended to deliver justice to a complex, varied and rather troubled population of over 50 million people, is dominated by a small, heterogeneous grouping - male, products of public school and/or Oxbridge and overwhelmingly from London or the South-east.

The Bar Council, whose latest training reforms are reported on page 2, is aware of this. Its long-term aim of making the profession look more like England and Wales and less like the Marylebone Cricket Club is among the longest-running of the academic and professional sagas chronicled week by week in these pages.

The resistance into which it runs reflects a mix of inertia, vested interest and genuine concern that botched reform may do real damage to the system. So its plan to add a training element to the dining requirements still central to the profession's arcane system deserves some sort of welcome. It is a further step towards recognising that the system can only benefit if its practitioners are properly trained in the skills of the trade.

But it does not go nearly far enough. The central problem is that the dining requirement is retained - and both the meals and the training will happen in London. The suspicion is that the training element of dining involves at least some measure of camouflage and will be distinctly subordinate to the eating and drinking.

The dining requirement is an absurd anachronism, utterly irrelevant to legal training. By all means let the Inns of Court continue to wine and dine collectively. Many students enjoy the ritual and it doubtless contributes to a sense of continuity and community. But to make it a compulsory element in professional training is ludicrous.

And why should the training automatically take place in London? This is symptomatic of another British disease - chronic over-centralisation on the capital. Why should students based in Nottingham, Cardiff or Newcastle have, on top of the very considerable burdens placed on every trainee barrister, to reckon with the extra time and cost involved in travelling to and staying in London? There is at least one good law department in each of those cities.

So long as the Bar continues to display so unimaginatively metropolitan a mindset, its will and ability to become more representative of the society whose legal system it operates will be open to serious doubt.