Felix | Will you miss it when it's gone?

In recent days there has been an industry of reflection, comment, nostalgia, assessment and re-appraisal, hyperbole, distasteful celebration, miles of newsprint and millions of words on the death of Lady Thatcher. For a significant proportion of the country she, and her time, was politics. She was there so long she was all that many had ever known; her downfall has been described as "matricide" rather than the inevitable resignation of someone who has held a job for a long time and now it is time for a change. It is true that her shadow remains over politics today. To some this is an awkward embarrassment, to others she is the Queen Over the Water - an exiled philosophy, where none today have the gumption to do as she did and be as she was.

The fact is that most people's reputations undergo reassessment in death. Reading the obituaries it is rare for the true contemporary colours of a person to shine through. This is common of judges - the comments such as "he did not suffer fools gladly" means that HHJ was bad tempered, impatient and probably often unfair. Phrases such as, "He could on occasions show great kindness to junior members of the Bar" might well mean that most of the time he was a tyrant but very occasionally, for some capricious reason, he would decide that he quite liked someone (a sort of respite therapy, presumably, from the full-time job of being vile) and might smile, or invite them in to his chambers for a cup of tea. Having the odd favourite is a good way of sustaining bad behaviour, as it means that there are still the odd sunny periods in the working week, and there is the odd (blind) supporter in the robing room.

Curiously it seems however that the days of the truly terrifying judge have passed, on the whole. I can remember whole court centres that were infected with - near to a man (only) - seriously bad tempered judiciary. The only good thing about being briefed to go to such a court would be the journey home.

Occasionally it is tempting to look back and see such behaviour through a rose-tinted lens of nostalgia - not least because we all got paid much more then, and there was plenty of work for a very junior barrister on a Friday morning.

We can look back and say that of course it was all the more colourful then, more fun, less uptight and hide bound by targets, rules, forms, time estimates.

There is something of that in the retrospectives about Lady Thatcher. Without expressing a view, it seems that nobody can in all that time have been wholly a force one way or the other. It may be that much of what she did was necessary and good for the country, and some of it equally disastrous; others may see the ratio the other way round. There are odd dichotomies, from the credit for the role played in ending the Cold War versus the indulgence towards apartheid South Africa. The eulogies based on sincere and compassionate letters written to the bereaved or suffering compare oddly to the indifference to the suffering that was visited on the blameless and helpless people by her economic policies.

What there is to do is of course learn lessons from the past to understand better today and shape the future, as we understand the value of history. The late Hugo Young, a biographer of Lady Thatcher, wrote in a piece in The Guardian that said: "What happened at the hands of [her] indifference to sentiment and good sense in the early 1980s brought unnecessary calamity to the lives of several million people who lost their jobs... Everything was justified as long as it made money - and this, too, is still with us."

This is something that we should all consider when assessing where we are today in terms of the criminal justice system. As I write this the independent Criminal Bar is facing the biggest and most profound and concerted effort to effectively annihilate it. The cuts to be imposed, the reduction of work, the new and varied "business models" will destroy, with indifference, the culture that strives to provide the tension in the system that makes our system of justice still the fairest and safest in the world. We as a country will lose the good people; we will end up spending more, much more, on people in prison who should not be there and on people committing further crimes on the streets when they should not be there. Like everything it needed reform, had become bloated and vulnerable to exploitation, but reform should not be the same as destruction. A scorched earth policy as regards legal aid and the courts, with indifference to the idea of building value in it's place spells disaster.

Too many things in life are only appreciated once they are gone. A reading of the obituaries tells us that. For the criminal Bar there may be the odd piece of double-speak in our obituary, it is not and has not been perfect; but in standing up to all those puce and unfair judges, in fighting the defendant's corner, in demonstrating through meticulously prepared cross-examination that the defendant is lying, ours is a profession that has led a good and valuable life.

If we just count the cost and not the value, then we will all be heaving a heavy sigh in a few years time.