This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
So farewell the Chancery Division of the High Court. David Lammy, whose unfortunate tenure as Lord High Chancellor has also seen the decision to kill off our ancient rights to a trial by jury, has decided that what Britain needs in these dark and miserable days is a “Business and Property Division” of the High Court.
This is because the legal profession, we are told, could not possibly know what the 677-year-old Chancery Division was without a name change. In this he was advised by the Lady Chief Justice, who feels that her profession could not possibly know her sex had she not renamed the 750-year-old office of Lord Chief Justice on taking over. But there we are.
So, another ancient title bites the dust. The armies of progress march forward one colourless name change after another. Slowly their anaemic world of clipboards, lanyards, bleached pine furniture and pointlessly dull official titles takes shape.
And yet I feel hope. Back when Tony Blair was introducing the Human Rights Act and driving Latin out of the courts and expelling the hereditary peers it all felt inevitable. When I raise my very junior voice against innovations like the Supreme Court people might roll their eyes gently at a display of romanticism, but nobody thought this was anything but a ratchet.
Not so now. Reaction is in the air. Evelyn Waugh once lamented that “the Conservative Party has never put the clock back a single second”, but when the next right-wing government takes office I do not believe it will be possible to avoid putting the clock back. The old joke much beloved of political speeches, which always ends with some yokel telling some city dwellers in the car, “Well, I wouldn’t have started from here” never gets taken to its logical conclusion. If you’ve taken a wrong turning, it is best to go back and take the right turning instead.
The crisis we find ourselves in now is one that doesn’t feel like it can be solved by just carrying straight ahead, albeit acknowledging that you wouldn’t have started from here. One of the things that I hope is being realised as we appreciate the enormity of the omnicrisis of the British State is that many of the things dismissed as merely aesthetic actually matter.
Having a Year Zero approach to the law is not incidental. What you wear affects how you think
Thus the abolition of a near-700-year-old Division of the Court and its rebranding as something insipid. This matters. It matters because knowing that you are acting within a living tradition gives you a much greater sense of the world within which you operate, inhabited by those who have gone before and those who are yet to come.
Similarly the trashing of the robes worn by the judiciary in the civic courts (if you haven’t seen them, they look like something worn in Star Trek) matters, as does the increasing reluctance of the legal profession to wear their wigs. Having a Year Zero approach to the law is not incidental. What you wear affects how you think.
This applies to the enforcement of the law too. Constables dressed smartly interact with the public in a very different way — and are seen in a very different way — from those dressed as nightclub bouncers. The change in their dress reflects the change in their oath — another Blairite reform nobody thought to undo. “I will well and truly serve Our Sovereign Lady the Queen in the office of constable, without favour or affection, malice or ill will” is just not the same as “I will well and truly serve the King in the office of constable, with fairness, integrity, diligence and impartiality, upholding fundamental human rights and according equal respect to all people”. If we are to lay to rest the fears of a two-tier police system, it is essential that we return to a police force that acts “without favour or affection”.
Uniforms, oaths, titles, offices. These are the joints that hold together the structures of the state; that make up the conceptual thought-world within which we operate; that tell a story of a nation that reaches back centuries — or one that began in 1997. We now know the 1997 one just doesn’t work. The more that they plough ahead with this failed Blairite experiment, the harder it will be to undo.
So I have hope that the Wind of Reaction is blowing through this island, and that it will blow away not only the constitutional errors but also the more subtle indicators of this new concept of the state which has been found so unequal to the task of governing in this century.
As we go back and restore that which has been lost, we can enjoy the looks on the faces of the failed revolutionaries as they once more sit bewigged in the Division of Chancery, risking an appeal to the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords, knowing that they are guarded by well-dressed constables who act without favour or affection.
God blew and they were scattered.
