FraserWords

HERE’S Frankly Fraser for the week beginning May 30^th, 2011.

A FRIEND of mine once asked a surgeon what he earned.

The surgeon named a figure somewhere approaching the Wayne Rooney bracket. “Good grief!”, said my friend, astonished. “I work damned hard for it,” said the surgeon, defensively. Shaking his head, my friend said: “My dad spent eight hours at a time hacking at rocks a mile down a coal mine. That’s hard work…” “I save lives,” said the surgeon, indignantly. “In an operating theatre using electricity and heat?,” said my friend.

Worth. Toughie, isn’t it? And in this argument, where would one fit the lawyers?

I ask because last week it was revealed that the Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust, in whose hands many of us in Cornwall place our health, faces legal bills approaching £380,000 in connection with its former chief executive John Watkinson. RCHT dismissed him; he took it to employment tribunal and won; there were subsequent reviews and appeals.

So far, £378,599 on legal fees. Ker-ching.

You can approach the argument from an awful lot of angles. For example, what do you think of the morality of lawyers prepared to take such vast pots of taxpayers’ money from the National Health Service? Are they snatching drugs from the upturned mouths of the sick?

Or what do you think such fees mean about the possibility of pursuing your own beliefs about justice through the courts? Is justice open and available to all? Can we all afford recourse to a court to hear reasoned argument and reach judgment over a matter that concerns us?

Or do you think the money justified? No doubt many of the lawyers involved worked long, late hours using expertise that was long and painful in the gathering. Without them, the world would be in a chaos of uncertainty. Maybe if you divided the total sum by the hours worked, the hourly rate would be no more than that of a plasterer. Or wordsmith. I offer the argument, though with the caveat that I have not yet met many hard-up lawyers.

Me? I believe any society that has elevated the lawyers to the stellar salaries exampled by the RCHT bill has got it wrong. Justice shouldn’t be an expensive luxury. Neither should clarity in the rules surrounding all the areas that make up our lives – our jobs, our pursuits, our governance, our possessions. And there should be some sort of legal framework decided by Parliament that caps fees in the public sector, where it’s taxpayers’ money being used.

And all of that you get from me, for free.

THANKS to all of you who joined in last week’s debate. I rather like it that the serious questions about the use of language and the end of the world were lost in the debate about shrinking rock stars.

The last word should go to our friend from way out west who raised the topic in the first place with his description of a small and undistinguished Chuck Berry at St Erth Railway Station, only to be shouted down by our correspondents insisting the rock legend was actually a lanky rock legend.

From the far west, we hear: “How strange. I suppose it was an illusion, but when all you’ve seen of someone is a dominating figure on a big stage doing a duck-walk, a quiet ordinary guy standing in a railway station in an overcoat looks tiny. I suppose performing gives everyone an extra couple of feet. No heightist offence to CB. There are several tales of that visit I could tell but, whoops, here comes a superinjunction…”