This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

Last week we learned that ambulance-chasing ‘no win, no fee’ lawyers are sucking £440 million out of the NHS every year. That’s just their share of the loot. Lawsuits in total cost the Health Service more than £1.5 billion a year.

Any visitor to NHS hospitals knows that these cynical firms are allowed to advertise their ‘services’ in the public areas of hospitals themselves. In effect, the NHS has to help people to ruin it.

There is no need for any of this. It all stems from a crazy mistake made back in the 1990s by Margaret Thatcher and John Major.

Almost everyone who understood the subject was against introducing no win, no fee lawsuits at the time, including senior judges and distinguished lawyers.

They warned that it would ‘Americanise’ our legal system. And they were dead right. I can remember, as long ago as 1982, watching Paul Newman playing a deadbeat US lawyer in The Verdict.

The opening scene showed Newman hanging round funeral parlours, wretchedly handing his business card to the mourners of accident victims, in the hope of getting a case, any case.

At the time, I had no idea this went on. Later, during many visits to the US and while living there in the early 1990s, I discovered the hideous truth. Nobody, anywhere, was safe from a mad lawsuit which might well succeed.

I was warned, for instance, that if a guest in my house merely spilled hot water on himself, I could well face a gigantic lawsuit and lose it.

From this came the cringing, hyper-cautious ‘health and safety’ culture which dogs the supposed land of the free (and now dogs us too). Not to mention much higher costs for almost everything, as insurers raise their premiums to finance the incessant, huge payments.

Who, knowing this, would introduce this Bloodsuckers’ Charter in a country that didn’t have it? We did. A Royal commission had opposed it. The Law Commission didn’t like it.

It was excoriated by experts and laymen alike in the House of Lords, where it was attacked by the late Lord Rawlinson for introducing ‘ambulance-chasing’ in which lawyers acted ‘like vultures’.

But Mrs Thatcher went gaily ahead with this Bloodsuckers’ Charter, more politely known as the 1990 Courts And Legal Services Act (Section 58).

This cleared the way for the change, but was fitted with a time-delay device – perhaps because the Government was ashamed of it and didn’t want to be linked with it when it eventually took effect.

IT was finally activated in 1995 by the passage of the Conditional Fee Agreements Regulations. In a last-ditch attempt to stop it, which failed by only six votes, the late Lord Ackner warned ‘there will be occasions when this country will exceed the worst excesses of the United States’.

He noted that the original Bill had been ‘enacted in the teeth of opposition from seven Law Lords, the Master of the Rolls, a former Lord Chancellor, my noble and learned friend Lord Hailsham, a former Attorney-General, the noble and learned lord, Lord Rawlinson of Ewell and the Law Commission’.

The clear reason for the measure was to save money on legal aid, which is of course a very costly way of trying to see that justice is open to those who are not rich. But, as we now see, it was a false economy. The NHS’s annual legal bill of £1.5 billion is only slightly less than the £1.7 billion which legal aid cost the whole country in 2014-15.

And that is just the NHS. Who can count the extra costs loaded on to every other public body, from schools to the Army, and on to every private company, by the need to guard against opportunist lawyers scouring the country for plaintiffs seeking a payout?

In the catalogue of mistakes made by governments, this is a pretty big one. But it is also quite easy to put right. Who would weep, apart from the legal vultures, if we abolished no win, no fee and went back to legal aid for reasonable cases? It would obviously cost less in the long run.

My guess is that nothing happens because most people still blame the loopy ‘Health and Safety’ culture, wrongly, on human rights laws or political correctness. It has nothing to do with them. It can’t even be blamed on Anthony Blair, who was indeed a disaster but didn’t wreck the country all by himself. It was just a stupid mistake. Theresa May has the sense to reverse it, and should do so.



How YOU can help save a vital freedom...

Journalists and newspapers aren’t always very nice. I have been on the receiving end of my trade’s less lovable features, during a (long-ago) family tragedy, and so I know this better than most reporters.

That’s why I’m not inclined to be pious about press freedom. We scribblers are never going to end up commemorated in stained-glass windows. Like many important parts of a free society, our liberty is a two-edged sword.

But you’ll miss it once it is gone. There is, literally, nobody else with the power to take on big government and big corporations. They talk to us (and try ceaselessly to bamboozle and cajole us) because they are afraid of us.

And if they weren’t, they would be greedier, more incompetent, lazier, and more crooked than they are.

Thomas Jefferson, one of the founders of the USA, a man who understood the cynicism and untrustworthiness of politicians very well, because he was a politician, put it best. ‘Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.’

Now, lesser men and women are quietly building a coffin for press freedom in this country. Some of them have had their own nasty actions exposed by newspapers. Others just don’t like seeing opinions they don’t share given a powerful platform.

There is still time to stop them, but it is very short.

Thanks to a foolish law passed by David Cameron, the Culture Secretary, Karen Bradley, can by a stroke of her pen bring back that ancient wrong, state regulation of newspapers, under the threat of bankruptcy for those who don’t comply. Please write to her, as soon as you can, urging her not to do so – or use the coupon on Page 44.

They’ve taken a bite out of Mars

THERE’S a technique for raising prices without drawing attention to it, known in the food trade as ‘shrinking the chocolate bar’.

The bar gets smaller. The price stays the same. The poor consumer quite possibly doesn’t notice.

This has all got much easier since the state-sponsored attack on customary British weights and measures, our old landmarks and signposts.

Who knows what a gram is, or feels like? But I know the feel of four ounces of toffees in the palm of my hand, just as I know what it means when someone measures five feet nine inches tall, but have to look it up when he says he is 1.7526 metres. Now that fine body the British Weights and Measures Association (BWMA) has spotted a very odd change in the Mars Bar, once two ounces (or 58 grams).

In 2014 that went down to 51 grams. Only the keen-eyed would have noticed that this was even a change.

The BWMA cheekily wrote to Mars asking why they couldn’t put the weight of their bars in ounces as well as grams on the wrapper.

The company said (incorrectly) that the figure in grams was more accurate. Now it turns out that Mars Bars made in metric Holland do give the weight in ounces and grams, clearly showing that the weight has been reduced to 1.80oz.

I wonder why they can’t do that on the bars they make in Britain, where so many of us still think in English measures?

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