JonasBezzubovas.com

Independent legal research and commentary

  • Lawyer or Solicitor? A Transatlantic Crisis of Legal Vocabulary

    Or why the simplest word isn’t always the most precise.

    When I lived in America, I noticed something rather interesting about the way people talked about the legal profession.

    They called lawyers lawyers.

    Sometimes they called them attorneys.

    But they didn’t generally distinguish between solicitors and barristers in the way we do in England and Wales.

    If someone needed legal advice, they called a lawyer.

    If someone was being prosecuted, they hired a lawyer.

    If someone threatened to sue them, they announced that their lawyer would be in touch.

    Simple.

    Back in Britain, we have a rather more elaborate vocabulary.

    You might need a solicitor.

    Or a barrister.

    Or perhaps a solicitor-advocate.

    And before you know it, a conversation about getting legal advice has turned into a small examination on the structure of the English legal profession.

    Which raises a question.

    Why does the word lawyer sound so immediately understandable, while solicitor sounds like something you ought to have studied before you’re allowed to use it?

    1. The Beautiful Simplicity of the Word Lawyer

    Let’s examine the word itself.

    Lawyer.

    It sounds like exactly what it means.

    A person who works with the law.

    You don’t need to know anything about the legal profession to appreciate the basic idea.

    Silicon Valley (HBO)

    We have gardeners who work in gardens, builders who build things and lawyers who work with the law.

    English doesn’t always make life this straightforward, so perhaps we should appreciate the occasion.

    Now consider solicitor.

    What exactly does a solicitor solicit?

    Clients?

    Advice?

    Documents?

    The word doesn’t immediately reveal the profession it describes.

    In fact, its history is rather interesting.

    Solicitor comes through French from a Latin root associated with urging, prompting or setting something in motion.

    In medieval English, it could describe someone who acted on another person’s behalf or conducted their affairs.

    That makes considerably more sense once you know the history.

    A solicitor was somebody who pursued matters for someone else.

    The trouble is that this explanation requires knowing the history.

    The word lawyer, meanwhile, simply gets on with the job.

    2. Why Britain Has Solicitors and Barristers

    England and Wales developed a legal profession with distinct roles.

    Historically, solicitors dealt extensively with clients, legal paperwork, transactions and the preparation of cases.

    Barristers specialised in advocacy, particularly in the higher courts, and in providing specialist legal opinions.

    The distinction grew out of centuries of institutional development rather than somebody sitting down one afternoon and designing the most understandable legal system imaginable.

    And the boundaries are not as rigid today as the traditional description might suggest.

    Solicitors can appear in courts and tribunals, with suitably qualified solicitor-advocates able to exercise rights of audience in higher courts.

    Barristers can, in appropriate circumstances, accept instructions directly from members of the public.

    Nevertheless, the two professions remain separately regulated and retain distinct professional identities.

    So the word solicitor does communicate something important.

    It identifies a particular legal qualification.

    It isn’t merely a more elaborate synonym for lawyer.

    And that’s where the British terminology has a genuine advantage.

    It tells us more precisely what sort of legal professional we’re dealing with.

    Assuming, of course, we already know what a solicitor is.

    3. America: Everybody’s Lawyer, Nobody’s Solicitor?

    The United States largely uses a different vocabulary.

    The words lawyer and attorney are commonly used for people licensed to practise law.

    An American lawyer might advise clients, prepare documents, negotiate settlements and represent people in court, subject to the rules governing their practice and jurisdiction.

    The familiar English division between solicitor and barrister isn’t generally how the American profession is organised.

    That doesn’t mean American lawyers all perform identical work.

    Far from it.

    They specialise in criminal defence, family law, immigration, commercial litigation, intellectual property and countless other fields.

    But their professional titles don’t usually reproduce the English solicitor-barrister distinction.

    There is, however, a lovely linguistic complication.

    America hasn’t entirely abandoned the word solicitor.

    It survives in certain official titles, most famously the Solicitor General, who represents the federal government’s interests before the United States Supreme Court.

    And in everyday American English, a solicitor might also be somebody knocking on your door trying to sell you something.

    Which could produce a rather unfortunate misunderstanding if you announced that a solicitor had arrived at your house.

    In England, you might be expecting legal advice.

    In America, you might be expecting somebody to sell you double glazing.

    4. Precision Versus Understanding

    Here’s where the question becomes more serious.

    In England and Wales, solicitor is a protected professional title.

    Someone cannot simply declare themselves a solicitor without being entitled to use that description.

    The term lawyer, however, does not have the same legally protected status.

    According to the Solicitors Regulation Authority, the word has no defined meaning in UK law and does not, by itself, guarantee that the person using it holds a regulated professional qualification.

    That is an important distinction.

    Imagine two people advertising legal assistance.

    One describes herself as a solicitor.

    The other describes himself as a lawyer.

    To somebody unfamiliar with the legal profession, both descriptions might sound equally reassuring.

    But they don’t necessarily communicate the same regulatory status.

    A solicitor’s professional standing can be checked against the relevant register.

    The generic title lawyer alone does not establish equivalent credentials.

    Suddenly, the word that seemed unnecessarily complicated has a very practical purpose.

    Solicitor is less intuitive, but more precise. Lawyer is more intuitive, but potentially less informative.

    Neither word is universally better.

    They solve different communication problems.

    5. When Professional Language Becomes a Barrier

    This reminds me of something I’ve been encountering while trying to navigate the English justice system.

    There is an enormous difference between a system being technically correct and a system being understandable to the people who need to use it.

    A court employee might know exactly what a URN is.

    A solicitor might immediately recognise the distinction between a case number and an enforcement account number.

    A barrister might understand the procedural implications of a particular court order without giving it a second thought.

    But an ordinary member of the public may not know any of those things.

    And why should they?

    Most people don’t spend their lives studying legal procedure.

    They encounter it when something has gone wrong, when a dispute arises, or when they need professional assistance.

    That is probably the worst possible moment to discover that the language itself requires an introduction.

    The legal profession needs technical vocabulary.

    Precision matters when people’s rights, liberty and property are at stake.

    But precision should not become an excuse for making explanations unnecessarily difficult.

    A good professional can use the technically correct term and then explain what it means.

    A good public service should do the same.

    6. A Software Engineer’s Perspective

    In software engineering, we spend considerable time thinking about interfaces.

    An interface is how one system communicates with another.

    And a good interface should communicate enough information for its user to understand what is happening without requiring intimate knowledge of everything underneath.

    Imagine a website with two buttons.

    One says:

    Submit.

    The other says:

    Execute asynchronous transaction persistence operation.

    Both might ultimately do the same thing.

    One tells the user what they need to know.

    The other tells the user that the developer has recently discovered a thesaurus.

    Legal terminology can present a similar problem.

    A specialist term may be perfectly accurate within the profession but confusing to somebody outside it.

    That doesn’t mean we should abolish technical language.

    It means we should design explanations around the audience.

    Perhaps lawyer is the useful public-facing category, while solicitor and barrister provide the necessary professional detail.

    We already do something similar in other industries.

    A person might describe themselves as an engineer before explaining that they specialise in software, civil engineering or electronics.

    The broad term establishes the general field.

    The specific term explains the expertise.

    Why shouldn’t legal communication work in much the same way?

    7. Should We Just Call Everybody a Lawyer?

    Not quite.

    There’s a risk in simplifying professional language too far.

    If we treated lawyer, solicitor and barrister as interchangeable, we could obscure meaningful differences in qualifications, regulation and the services someone is authorised to provide.

    And when someone is paying for legal advice, those differences matter.

    But I do think there’s a case for leading with the language people naturally understand.

    For example:

    I’m a lawyer, qualified as a solicitor in England and Wales.

    That tells somebody two useful things.

    First, the person works in the legal profession.

    Second, they hold a specific professional qualification.

    It’s understandable without sacrificing precision.

    And it doesn’t require the listener to have completed a preliminary course in English legal history.

    So, What Should We Call Them?

    Perhaps the answer depends on what we’re trying to communicate.

    If I’m discussing the legal profession generally, lawyer seems perfectly sensible.

    If I’m identifying a particular qualification in England and Wales, solicitor or barrister is more informative.

    And if I’m speaking to somebody who has never encountered the British legal system, I might use both.

    Because the purpose of language is not merely to demonstrate that the speaker understands something.

    It’s to help the listener understand it too.

    That’s a lesson that extends far beyond the legal profession.

    Our institutions accumulate specialised vocabulary over centuries.

    Sometimes that vocabulary preserves important distinctions.

    Sometimes it preserves historical accidents.

    And sometimes it simply makes ordinary people feel as though they’ve walked into a conversation that began several hundred years before they arrived.

    The best legal language should be precise enough to protect people and simple enough to help them.

    After all, a lawyer is someone who works with the law.

    A solicitor is a particular kind of lawyer.

    And explaining that distinction shouldn’t require another lawyer.

  • What Came First: The Law or the Lawyer?

    What came first: the law or the lawyer?

    The law.

    There. Mystery solved.

    Thank you for reading.

    Unfortunately, having answered the question in considerably less time than it takes to get through to the Single Justice Service, I now find myself with an entire blog post still to write.

    So perhaps we should investigate.

    Because the more interesting question isn’t simply which came first. It’s how we arrived at a world in which ordinary people may need specialist assistance just to understand the rules governing their own lives.

    Who settled disputes before lawyers existed?

    Who decided whether someone had stolen a goat?

    Who determined whether a field belonged to one farmer or another?

    And if somebody committed murder, who had the authority to decide what happened next?

    Today, we imagine justice taking place inside a courtroom, involving a judge, barristers, solicitors, evidence, witnesses and a considerable quantity of paperwork.

    But these features didn’t arrive together.

    The history of law is, in many ways, the history of societies trying to solve the same problems with increasingly elaborate machinery.

    Let’s start at the beginning.

    1. Ancient Mesopotamia: The Law Before the Lawyer

    Approximately 2000–500 BCE

    Thousands of years before anybody could qualify as a solicitor, the inhabitants of ancient Mesopotamia were already arguing about property, debts, inheritance, marriage and compensation for injuries.

    Human nature, it seems, has remained remarkably consistent.

    The famous Code of Hammurabi, produced in Babylon during the eighteenth century BCE, is one of the best-known surviving collections of ancient laws.

    It dealt with subjects ranging from commercial transactions to family obligations and physical injuries.

    But we shouldn’t imagine it functioning like a modern statute book, consulted by barristers in a courtroom.

    Ancient Mesopotamian justice operated through rulers, officials, judges, elders and local institutions. Written contracts, witnesses and sworn statements could play important roles in resolving disputes.

    There were people knowledgeable about legal practices, including scribes who prepared documents, but there was no modern profession divided into solicitors and barristers.

    If you had a dispute, you might appear before local authorities and present your account.

    You didn’t necessarily need a lawyer.

    You did, however, need to understand the social hierarchy.

    Ancient legal systems often distinguished between people according to status. The penalties and protections available to one person were not necessarily available to another.

    So although law existed, equality before the law was far from guaranteed.

    This reveals something important.

    The earliest legal systems were not simply machines for delivering justice. They were also instruments for organising society and preserving authority.

    Law came first.

    Fairness was still a work in progress.

    2. Classical Athens: The Citizens Become the Court

    Fifth and fourth centuries BCE

    Now we travel to Athens, where the ancient Greeks developed a particularly interesting approach to justice.

    Instead of relying entirely on a professional judiciary, classical Athens used large juries of citizens.

    And by large, I mean genuinely large.

    Some cases were heard by hundreds of jurors.

    Imagine trying to persuade five hundred people that your neighbour had stolen your goat.

    You would certainly want to prepare your speech.

    In Athens, litigants were generally expected to present their own cases.

    There were no barristers in the modern English sense, although professional speechwriters, known as logographers, could prepare arguments for people who could afford their services.

    In other words, you couldn’t necessarily hire somebody to stand up and argue for you, but you might hire somebody to write something impressive for you to say.

    An early version of outsourcing, perhaps.

    The system reflected Athenian ideas about citizen participation, but we must be careful with the word citizen.

    Women, enslaved people and many residents who lacked citizenship were excluded from equal participation in the political and judicial system.

    Democracy had arrived, but its membership policy was rather restrictive.

    Still, Athens gives us an interesting stage in the evolution of law.

    The people deciding cases weren’t necessarily professional legal experts.

    They were members of the civic community.

    And the people presenting arguments weren’t necessarily lawyers.

    They were the people involved in the dispute.

    That raises a question which still matters today:

    Should understanding and participating in justice be an ordinary civic responsibility, or something reserved for specialists?

    3. Ancient Rome: The Lawyer Begins to Emerge

    Approximately 200 BCE–400 CE

    Rome complicates the story.

    Which, given what Roman law eventually became, seems appropriate.

    As Roman society expanded, so did the complexity of its legal arrangements.

    There were disputes over contracts, property, inheritance, citizenship, commercial transactions and the responsibilities of public officials.

    And increasingly, people developed specialised knowledge about how those rules worked.

    Roman jurists studied and interpreted legal principles. Advocates helped people present arguments. Patrons could assist clients in navigating legal and political institutions.

    These weren’t identical to modern solicitors and barristers, but we can begin to recognise familiar professional functions.

    Somebody understands the rules.

    Somebody else has a problem.

    The person with the problem seeks assistance from the person who understands the rules.

    The legal profession begins to take shape.

    And with it comes a rather interesting development.

    The more sophisticated the law becomes, the more valuable legal expertise becomes.

    That can be a good thing.

    Specialists can challenge unfair accusations, interpret complicated rules and help people defend their rights.

    But specialisation also creates dependence.

    A system designed to organise society can gradually become difficult for ordinary members of that society to navigate without professional help.

    Rome didn’t invent that problem.

    It certainly helped demonstrate how far legal complexity could develop.

    4. Medieval London: When the City Became Its Own Legal System

    Approximately the twelfth to fifteenth centuries

    Let’s travel to London, several centuries before anybody could telephone HMCTS and spend half the morning listening to hold music.

    Medieval London was already a complicated place.

    Merchants traded goods. Landlords collected rents. Apprentices learned trades. Families argued over inheritance. People accused one another of theft, assault and other offences.

    Somebody had to settle these disputes.

    And there wasn’t one convenient institution called The Legal System into which every problem could be deposited.

    London had its own civic institutions, including the Court of Husting, whose history stretches back to the Anglo-Saxon period.

    By the Middle Ages, the City’s aldermen, sheriffs and other officials exercised important judicial and administrative responsibilities.

    The Court of Husting became particularly associated with matters involving property and inheritance.

    Other courts handled different categories of dispute.

    There were also royal courts, local customs, ecclesiastical jurisdictions and developing common-law procedures.

    If that sounds like overlapping institutional responsibilities, that’s because it was.

    Some aspects of medieval London are beginning to sound uncomfortably familiar.

    Enter Newgate and the Old Bailey

    Newgate became one of London’s most notorious prisons.

    The area around it would eventually become closely associated with the Old Bailey and the administration of criminal justice.

    But we should be careful not to imagine today’s Central Criminal Court simply transported backwards into medieval London.

    The modern building didn’t exist.

    Nor did the modern Crown Court.

    The courts, their jurisdictions and their procedures developed over centuries.

    The surviving published Old Bailey Proceedings begin in 1674, well after the medieval period.

    Nevertheless, the underlying problem remained consistent.

    London needed institutions capable of hearing accusations, settling disputes, determining guilt and enforcing judgments.

    And as the rules became more elaborate, people who understood those rules became increasingly valuable.

    By medieval times, England had already developed recognisable legal practitioners, and the Inns of Court became important centres of legal education and professional life.

    The lawyer had well and truly arrived.

    The law, meanwhile, was becoming a career.

    5. London Today: The Old Bailey and the Price of Complexity

    Twenty-first century

    Now let’s return to London in 2026.

    Walk along the Old Bailey in the City of London and you’ll find the Central Criminal Court, crowned by a golden figure of Justice holding her sword and scales.

    The present courthouse opened in 1907, although criminal trials in the area have a much longer history.

    In 1834, the Old Bailey was formally established as the Central Criminal Court.

    Today, serious criminal cases are heard there under an extensive framework of legislation, evidence rules, procedural safeguards and rights of appeal.

    Judges direct proceedings and interpret the law.

    Barristers present cases and challenge evidence.

    Solicitors advise clients and prepare cases.

    Juries determine questions of fact in trials where they are required.

    And defendants have legal protections that would have been unfamiliar, or entirely unavailable, in many earlier societies.

    That is progress worth recognising.

    We shouldn’t romanticise ancient courts simply because their procedures were less complicated.

    A simpler system isn’t necessarily a fairer one.

    The development of legal safeguards has helped protect people from arbitrary punishment, unreliable accusations and abuses of authority.

    But there’s an uncomfortable complication.

    Have We Made Justice Too Complicated to Navigate?

    In ancient Athens, a citizen might be expected to stand up and argue his own case.

    In medieval London, disputes could be handled by civic officials familiar with local customs.

    Today, even identifying the correct court, prosecuting authority or procedure can require specialist knowledge.

    I recently spent several hours contacting government departments in an attempt to trace historical court proceedings associated with MS90 endorsements recorded against me.

    Eventually, an enforcement team supplied account references.

    The Single Justice Service then asked for identifying information, including the prosecuting authority and offence date.

    Reasonable questions, perhaps.

    Except that those are among the details I am trying to establish.

    I am asking the system to identify the proceedings.

    The system is asking me to identify the proceedings so that it can assist.

    There’s something almost historically poetic about it.

    Thousands of years ago, people could bring disputes before elders.

    Today, I have an account reference, an email address and six questions to answer.

    And I’m still trying to find the court record.

    The Old Bailey’s Digital Irony

    Here’s something particularly interesting.

    The Old Bailey Proceedings Online provides searchable accounts of nearly 198,000 criminal trials from 1674 to 1913.

    Researchers, historians and members of the public can explore centuries of London’s criminal justice history from a computer.

    The Open University was among the institutions involved in developing this remarkable digital resource.

    Think about that.

    We can search accounts of criminal trials conducted in London during the seventeenth century.

    Yet tracing the records of a much more recent case can still involve several telephone calls, different departments and a degree of investigative persistence.

    There may be perfectly legitimate reasons for that difference, including privacy restrictions, fragmented record systems and the different purposes for which the information was collected.

    A historical public archive is not the same thing as a live court administration system.

    Nevertheless, the contrast is striking.

    It demonstrates what thoughtful digitisation can achieve.

    And it invites us to ask why navigating current administrative processes can sometimes feel more difficult than exploring the distant past.

    So, What Came First?

    The law.

    We established that at the beginning.

    But the journey from ancient Mesopotamia to the Old Bailey reveals something more interesting.

    Lawyers didn’t invent the need for justice.

    They emerged as societies developed increasingly elaborate rules, institutions and methods of resolving disputes.

    And legal specialisation brought genuine benefits.

    It created expertise, improved representation and helped develop procedures intended to protect people from unfair treatment.

    But it also contributed to a world in which understanding the law, and sometimes even locating the right part of the legal system, can become a specialist task.

    That leaves us with a question for the present.

    Have we made justice more sophisticated without always making it more accessible?

    Perhaps the next great improvement to the legal system won’t involve inventing another rule.

    Perhaps it will involve making the rules, the records and the institutions easier for ordinary people to understand.

    After all, the law existed before lawyers.

    And presumably, somewhere along the way, people managed to settle disputes without being asked to provide a case reference they were contacting the court to obtain.

    The law came first. The lawyer came later. And somewhere along the way, we invented the help desk.

  • Six Questions and No Answers: When the Justice System Needs a Help Desk

    15 October 2026

    On Monday, I spent approximately four hours trying to establish the details of historical MS90 convictions recorded against me.

    I telephoned one department, waited on hold, explained the situation, was directed elsewhere, waited on hold again, explained the situation again, and repeated the process until I began to wonder whether I was participating in an elaborate government-funded endurance experiment.

    Eventually, an enforcement team was able to locate historical information and provide two account references.

    Progress, at last.

    Armed with those references, I contacted the Single Justice Service (SJS), hoping to establish which courts dealt with the cases, when the proceedings took place and how I could obtain the relevant records.

    Today, I received a reply.

    It began politely enough.

    Good afternoon.

    Thank you for your email.

    Then came the questions.

    The Six Questions

    The SJS asked me to provide a URN, case number or account number so that they could locate the case.

    Fair enough. I now have enforcement account references, although I cannot yet say whether those references are sufficient for the SJS to retrieve the underlying proceedings.

    Then, to pass security, they requested my full name and six further details:

    1. Date of birth.
    2. First line of address.
    3. Postcode.
    4. The organisation prosecuting me.
    5. The type of offence.
    6. The date of the offence.

    Some of those questions are perfectly reasonable.

    Court records contain sensitive personal information. The service needs to establish that it is dealing with the right person before disclosing anything.

    I have no objection to security checks.

    My concern is with the assumptions built into the questions.

    What if the information they’re asking me to provide is the very information I’m contacting them to discover?

    Please Identify the Organisation You Cannot Identify

    Take question four.

    The organisation prosecuting you.

    In my case, that might have been South Yorkshire Police. West Yorkshire Police is another possibility, given the geographical connections associated with the vehicle’s history.

    But I don’t know.

    And I don’t want to turn a suspicion into a fact merely because a government department has asked me to fill in a blank.

    Likewise, I know that the convictions are recorded as MS90, but that is an endorsement code. It doesn’t, by itself, give me the original charge particulars, the prosecuting authority or the precise offence dates.

    Those are things I am trying to establish.

    So here I am, asking the justice system to identify a case, while the justice system asks me to identify the case before it can assist.

    There is a certain elegance to the circularity.

    Unfortunately, it’s the sort of elegance that makes you want to put your head through a desk.

    The Human Search Engine

    Something else bothered me about Monday’s telephone marathon.

    I contacted several government departments. Only a minority of the people I reached seemed able to access information that moved my enquiry forward.

    That isn’t necessarily a criticism of those individuals.

    One department may have access to a particular database while another does not. Staff may be restricted by security rules, departmental responsibilities or the age of the records.

    A perfectly capable employee cannot retrieve information from a system they aren’t permitted to access.

    But from the perspective of the person seeking help, the experience is bewildering.

    Every time I explained the situation, I had to reconstruct the story from the beginning.

    Historical conviction. MS90 endorsement. Unknown original proceedings. Multiple previous addresses. Missing case references. Uncertainty about which police force was involved.

    That’s not a simple enquiry.

    It’s a small investigation.

    And I was effectively asking each call handler to perform it while also navigating whatever software, procedures and institutional boundaries their department happened to operate under.

    At what point does a public-service call handler become an unpaid systems integrator?

    Or, more accurately, an under-supported one?

    Complexity Has a Labour Cost

    This is where the problem becomes bigger than my driving record.

    We often discuss public-sector inefficiency as though the solution is simply to demand more from public-sector employees.

    Answer calls faster.

    Clear backlogs.

    Reduce waiting times.

    Process more enquiries.

    But what happens when the underlying system becomes so complicated that even understanding a caller’s problem requires substantial institutional knowledge?

    The person answering the phone may need to understand the distinction between a court case number and an enforcement account number, between a police force and a prosecuting authority, between an endorsement code and an offence, and between different court procedures.

    They may also need to know which department owns which record, what can be disclosed, what cannot be disclosed, and which process applies when the caller doesn’t know the information normally used to identify a case.

    That’s a considerable cognitive workload.

    And much of it appears to arise not from the complexity of the law itself, but from the complexity of the systems surrounding it.

    I find myself wondering how the public sector recruits, trains and retains people capable of navigating these increasingly elaborate arrangements.

    Because people with strong analytical skills, technical confidence and the ability to untangle complicated processes are valuable well beyond the justice system.

    In a labour market where private employers may offer better pay or working conditions, public institutions cannot simply assume that such expertise will always be available.

    I don’t have the staffing or salary data to claim that this explains the difficulties I encountered.

    But the question is worth asking.

    If a service becomes more complicated every year, what happens when the people required to understand it are not given the resources, training or incentives to keep up?

    An Email Pretending to Be a Form

    There’s another curious feature of the SJS response.

    It’s effectively a form, delivered by email.

    Six numbered questions, plus a request for a reference number and a description of the enquiry.

    Yet email doesn’t distinguish between information that is known, information that is uncertain and information that is unavailable.

    It doesn’t provide an obvious option for “I don’t know the prosecuting authority.”

    It doesn’t explain whether the offence date is required to pass security or merely useful for locating the record.

    And it doesn’t clearly distinguish between an account number held by an enforcement team and the court’s original case reference.

    A properly designed online enquiry service could do all of those things.

    It could ask:

    What are you trying to find?

    Then:

    What information do you already have?

    It could accept a known case reference, an enforcement account number, an approximate date, previous addresses or a suspected prosecuting authority.

    Crucially, it could allow the user to select:

    Unknown.

    That isn’t a failure to complete the form.

    It is useful information about the nature of the enquiry.

    The service could generate a ticket number, route the request to the appropriate team and provide a record of what had been requested.

    Email could remain available for follow-up and for people unable or unwilling to use a web form.

    None of this would magically join incompatible court databases or restore records that no longer exist.

    Nor should a public website expose criminal case details without appropriate identity checks.

    But better enquiry design could make uncertainty easier to communicate and reduce the need for people to repeat the same complicated explanation to multiple departments.

    The Difference Between Automation and Digitisation

    There’s a delightful irony here.

    I’ve been writing about automated injustice: the danger of systems that replicate errors, apply rigid rules and make it difficult for human beings to challenge incorrect records.

    Now I’m suggesting that the justice system needs more digital infrastructure.

    But those ideas aren’t contradictory.

    Automating a decision about someone’s legal rights is very different from automating the administration of a request for information.

    I don’t want a computer deciding whether I committed an offence merely because a database contains an endorsement code.

    I would, however, quite like a computer to tell me which department holds the original court record.

    One kind of automation risks removing human judgment where it is essential.

    The other could free human beings from repetitive administrative work so that they can exercise judgment where it actually matters.

    Good digitisation should make the system more intelligible, not merely faster at repeating its existing mistakes.

    The Real Problem Isn’t the Person Answering the Email

    I want to be fair to the SJS.

    Their response was courteous. They asked for identifying information. They explained that they needed to pass security before providing case-specific details.

    They haven’t yet refused to help me.

    And I haven’t established that their staff are unable to find the cases using the enforcement references I obtained.

    Those are important distinctions.

    My criticism is not that someone sent me six questions.

    It’s that, after hours of telephone calls, the next step in tracing a historical court record still appears to depend on my ability to reconstruct details that may exist only within the very institutions I’m asking for help.

    That suggests a system whose complexity is being transferred to the public and to the staff working at its edges.

    Perhaps the next reply will locate everything.

    Perhaps the account numbers will unlock the records immediately, and I’ll discover that I’ve been unnecessarily pessimistic.

    I would be delighted to be proved wrong.

    But even if my particular enquiry is resolved tomorrow, the design question remains.

    Should finding out what happened in a court case require the investigative skills of a detective, the patience of a saint and the persistence of a software engineer debugging somebody else’s undocumented legacy system?

    Because if the answer is yes, perhaps the problem isn’t that the public doesn’t understand the justice system.

    Perhaps the justice system has become unnecessarily difficult to understand.

    And perhaps, before we automate any more justice, we ought to make sure people can actually find it.

  • To Study Law, or Not to Study Law?

    Wednesday, 14 October 2026

    This is where my little Shakespearean chapter comes to an end. Over the past few days, I’ve borrowed his language to make sense of the law, its delays and its peculiar relationship with ordinary human life. But today’s question deserves something more modern than a soliloquy: a spreadsheet.

    To study law, or not to study law?

    That is the question.

    And this time, I thought I might begin with some numbers.

    Act I: What Happens to Law Graduates?

    If somebody enrols on a Bachelor of Laws (LLB) course with the intention of becoming a lawyer, what are their chances of finding themselves in a legal profession after graduation?

    It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer.

    Fortunately, the Higher Education Statistics Agency conducts a Graduate Outcomes survey, and the results are published through Discover Uni.

    The survey asks graduates what they’re doing approximately fifteen months after completing their studies.

    That isn’t the same as asking whether they’ve qualified as solicitors or barristers. Qualification can take considerably longer, and some graduates pursue further education before entering practice.

    Nevertheless, the figures provide an interesting snapshot of where people actually go after studying law.

    Here are ten university law courses we’ve been examining, arranged by the proportion of employed survey respondents working in legal professional occupations.

    University and courseEmployed respondents in legal professional occupations
    Oxford — Jurisprudence55%
    Liverpool — Law with a Year Abroad55%
    Liverpool — standard LLB48%
    Durham — Law, broader subject data48%
    Surrey — Law45%
    Exeter — LLB Law44%
    Manchester Metropolitan — Law43%
    Nottingham — Law41%
    York — Law39%
    Bristol — Law36%

    Source: Discover Uni Graduate Outcomes course data, discussed and collected in October 2026. These are ten selected course entries, not the ten highest-performing law courses nationally. Survey cohorts, sample sizes and the degree of course-specific reporting differ.

    At first glance, something stands out.

    Only two entries exceed 50%.

    And one of those, Liverpool’s Law with a Year Abroad, is a relatively small course sample. Liverpool’s standard LLB records 48%.

    Oxford reports 55%, but even that figure doesn’t mean that 55% of everybody who starts the course will eventually become a lawyer.

    It means that 55% of the employed respondents whose occupations were captured in that particular survey were classified as legal professionals fifteen months after graduating.

    That’s a much narrower claim.

    Still, it raises a question.

    If someone studies law because they want to become a lawyer, should we be concerned when fewer than half of the employed graduates in many of these courses are already working in legal professional occupations?

    Act II: Is That Actually Bad News?

    My first reaction was surprise.

    If somebody studies medicine, we might reasonably expect a strong connection between the degree and the profession.

    Law feels similar. It has its own terminology, qualifications, institutions and professional rules.

    So why don’t these figures look more like a direct pipeline into legal practice?

    Part of the answer is timing.

    Fifteen months isn’t particularly long in the legal profession.

    Someone hoping to become a solicitor may still be preparing for professional examinations, looking for qualifying work experience or completing further study.

    Someone pursuing the Bar may still be undertaking vocational training or seeking pupillage.

    And not every graduate who wants a legal career will secure their preferred opportunity immediately.

    Then there’s the question of what counts as legal employment.

    The occupational category “legal professionals” doesn’t necessarily include everyone working in a law firm, court, regulatory body or legal-support role.

    Nor does it tell us which graduates will eventually qualify.

    There’s also a fundamental statistical problem.

    A percentage of employed survey respondents is not the probability that a new student will become a lawyer.

    Those are different populations, observed at different points in their careers.

    So we shouldn’t conclude that the majority of LLB graduates have less than a fifty-fifty chance of entering the legal profession.

    The data doesn’t establish that.

    But neither should we dismiss the figures as meaningless.

    They tell us that the transition from studying law to working in a legal profession is far from instantaneous.

    And that is worth knowing before committing years of study and substantial amounts of money to a degree.

    Act III: What Is a Law Degree Actually For?

    Perhaps the mistake is assuming that an LLB has only one purpose.

    A law degree can prepare someone for legal practice, but it can also develop abilities that are useful in business, government, journalism, policy, compliance and many other fields.

    Students learn to interpret complicated texts, examine evidence, construct arguments and identify where rules apply.

    Those skills don’t suddenly become worthless when their owner takes a job outside a courtroom.

    Indeed, perhaps the better question isn’t simply how many graduates become lawyers.

    Perhaps we should ask how many are doing meaningful work, whether their education helped them obtain it, and whether they consider the degree worthwhile.

    Discover Uni includes some of those broader measures too.

    That matters because a degree can be both professional preparation and an education in its own right.

    Still, if a university markets its LLB primarily as a route into legal practice, I think students are entitled to ask about the route.

    How many graduates obtain training contracts?

    How many secure pupillage?

    How many eventually qualify?

    How long does that take?

    And how much additional education, experience and expense is required after the undergraduate degree?

    Those would be more revealing measures of the professional pathway than a single employment snapshot.

    Unfortunately, they aren’t all answered by the headline Graduate Outcomes figures.

    Act IV: Must a Great Lawyer Have Studied Law?

    The next question is almost the reverse of the first.

    If studying law doesn’t guarantee a legal career, is studying law even necessary to become an exceptional lawyer?

    Consider ten distinguished British legal figures.

    Five studied law or jurisprudence as undergraduates.

    Five approached the profession from another academic direction.

    Studied law or jurisprudenceStudied another subject first
    Baroness Brenda HaleMichael Mansfield KC — philosophy
    Lord ReedDinah Rose KC — history
    Cherie Blair KCLord Jonathan Sumption — history
    Amal ClooneyLord Michael Briggs — history
    Keir StarmerHelena Kennedy KC — law-related studies following earlier education*

    An important qualification: Helena Kennedy KC is not a clean example of someone who qualified through an unrelated university degree, so she shouldn’t be treated as evidence for that category. The fifth position remains open pending a suitably verified example.

    Even without forcing the numbers into a perfectly symmetrical comparison, the point is clear.

    Some remarkable lawyers began with law.

    Others began with history or philosophy.

    Lord Sumption became one of the country’s leading advocates and later a Supreme Court justice despite having studied history rather than law as an undergraduate.

    Michael Mansfield’s background in philosophy hardly prevented him from becoming one of Britain’s most recognisable criminal barristers.

    Meanwhile, Baroness Hale and Lord Reed demonstrate what can be achieved by people who did study law from the outset.

    The evidence doesn’t establish that one route is superior.

    We’re looking at highly successful individuals, not a representative sample of graduates.

    But it does challenge the idea that a particular undergraduate subject is a necessary ingredient of legal excellence.

    The route into a profession is not necessarily the same thing as the qualities required to excel within it.

    Act V: The Software Engineer’s Perspective

    This is where my own situation becomes relevant.

    I studied software engineering.

    At first glance, that might seem rather distant from law.

    Software engineers deal with specifications, databases, interfaces, systems and logic.

    Lawyers deal with statutes, judgments, evidence, procedures and arguments.

    But the more I encounter the legal system, the more similarities I notice.

    Both disciplines depend on rules.

    Both involve interpreting imperfect information.

    Both require an understanding of how individual decisions affect a larger system.

    And both can suffer when the system behaves exactly as designed but produces a result that doesn’t reflect the reality of the situation.

    My recent experience trying to trace an old motoring conviction has made that painfully clear.

    Different departments held different pieces of information. One system could not identify a record that another could apparently retrieve. Finding the origin of a decision became an exercise in following references between institutions.

    To a software engineer, that sounds suspiciously like a problem involving data integrity, traceability and system interfaces.

    Of course, recognising an engineering analogy doesn’t mean I understand the relevant legal principles.

    A legal process isn’t simply a badly designed computer program.

    It involves human rights, obligations, standards of proof and procedural safeguards that cannot be reduced to technical efficiency.

    But perhaps a background in engineering provides a useful perspective.

    And perhaps studying law would help me understand the parts of the problem that engineering alone cannot explain.

    My LLM: A Navigation Instrument

    I’m considering studying for a Master of Laws.

    Not because I believe another degree will automatically create a new career.

    And not because I think an LLM is equivalent to qualifying as a solicitor or barrister.

    It isn’t.

    I’m interested because my professional direction is changing, and I’m beginning to explore questions that sit between technology, law, evidence and institutional accountability.

    That feels like uncharted territory.

    Software engineering has equipped me with certain instruments: systems thinking, technical analysis and a habit of questioning how information moves between components.

    But those instruments were designed for a different landscape.

    A postgraduate law degree could give me something I don’t yet possess: a structured understanding of legal concepts, institutions and methods.

    A map, perhaps.

    Or a compass.

    Something to help me navigate a field in which I can currently identify some of the problems but don’t always know the correct legal vocabulary for describing them.

    That doesn’t make my existing education irrelevant.

    Quite the opposite.

    I suspect the combination could be more useful than either discipline on its own.

    The Final Numbers

    Let’s return to the two comparisons.

    In our selected list of ten law-course entries, only two show more than half of employed respondents working in legal professional occupations fifteen months after graduation.

    That doesn’t establish that most law graduates will never become lawyers.

    It establishes that legal education and legal employment aren’t the same milestone.

    Meanwhile, among the distinguished legal figures we’ve examined, some began by studying law and others arrived through entirely different academic disciplines.

    That doesn’t establish that a law degree offers no advantage.

    It establishes that the legal profession can benefit from more than one kind of intellectual preparation.

    I think there’s something encouraging in both findings.

    An LLB doesn’t dictate your destination.

    And a degree in another subject doesn’t necessarily close the door to law.

    As for me, I already have one degree and a particular way of looking at the world.

    I’m not proposing to discard either.

    I’m considering adding another instrument to the toolkit.

    A degree cannot guarantee where you’ll end up. But when you’re entering unfamiliar territory, learning how to navigate is a perfectly good reason to study.

    And with that, I think Shakespeare can finally take his bow.

    The next chapter will have to be written in my own words.

  • The Law’s Delay: A Monday in Five Acts

    Monday, 12 October 2026 — A belated entry

    William Shakespeare died more than four hundred years ago.

    He never had to telephone His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service. He never listened to a recorded voice asking him to select an option from a menu. And, so far as I know, nobody ever subjected him to sixty consecutive minutes of hold music.

    Yet by the end of Monday, I was beginning to suspect that Shakespeare understood my predicament rather well.

    But I’m getting ahead of myself.

    Act I: To Press One, or Not to Press One

    My Monday began with what seemed a relatively straightforward objective.I needed to locate the court records behind an old MS90 conviction — an offence involving failure to provide information about the identity of a driver.I dispute that I was responsible for the alleged offence. The conviction appears to have contributed to the revocation of my full driving licence, and I had only recently become aware of the proceedings.

    The circumstances surrounding that period of my life were complicated. COVID had disrupted almost everything, and I’d changed addresses several times. I cannot yet say precisely what happened to the original notices, or why the conviction came to be associated with me.That’s what I’m trying to establish.

    Surely, I thought, the court would have a record.I telephoned HMCTS.Immediately, I encountered my first obstacle.

    The automated telephone service wanted to know whether my enquiry concerned the Single Justice Procedure.Now, many relatively minor motoring offences are dealt with under that procedure. But I didn’t know whether mine had been.

    And that was rather the point of calling.

    Unfortunately, the automated system offered no option for “I don’t know; could somebody please tell me?”

    It offered Yes or No.

    To press one, or not to press one?

    I spent approximately half an hour waiting to reach the relevant departments. In the end, neither could provide the historical MS90 case information I needed.

    The first act concluded without a case number, a court record or even a clear idea of who might possess either.

    Act II: A Welsh Voice and a Circular Journey

    By about 10am, I decided to try DVLA.If the conviction had resulted in penalty points and the loss of my driving licence, perhaps the agency responsible for maintaining driving records could identify the original endorsement.

    Unfortunately, the person I spoke to couldn’t locate the historical information I needed.

    There was, at least, the consolation of a pleasant Welsh accent.

    The adviser suggested contacting the penalty office and gave me a telephone number.

    Excellent, I thought. A new lead.

    I dialled it.

    And found myself listening to the very same automated service with which I had begun my morning.

    I had completed an entire administrative circuit and arrived back at the entrance.

    Had Shakespeare written this scene, I suspect the audience would have laughed.

    I was less amused.

    But the adviser had inadvertently given me something useful: the name of another department.So I searched online and found various contact numbers for penalty offices, many apparently concerned with collecting payments rather than investigating old cases.

    Eventually, I found a number for a North East England penalties office, based in Lincoln.

    Onward to Act III.Act III: The Hour of Waiting

    The next telephone call involved approximately another hour on hold.

    There is something peculiarly exhausting about waiting on a telephone.

    You cannot quite concentrate on anything else, because at any moment the music might stop and a human being might answer.

    You must remain alert enough to explain a complicated situation immediately, yet passive enough to endure the same short piece of music repeating indefinitely.

    It is neither proper rest nor productive work.

    It is a kind of administrative purgatory.

    When I finally reached someone, they were helpful. Unfortunately, the office no longer held the historical penalty information I needed.

    They could identify a more recent matter, but not the old MS90 case.

    Another dead end, or so it seemed.Then came the most useful suggestion of the morning.

    Because I had recently become aware of the historical matter through enforcement agents — commonly known as bailiffs — I should try contacting the court enforcement team.

    This was a department I hadn’t thought to approach.

    After all, I was trying to investigate the origins of a conviction, not pay an outstanding penalty.

    But perhaps the people responsible for enforcing a decision would retain information that the people answering general court enquiries could no longer find.It was worth one more call.

    Act IV: Enter the Enforcement Team

    By this point, it was approaching midday.

    I telephoned the enforcement team.Another hour on hold.Another hour of listening for the tiny interruption that might signal the arrival of an actual person.

    And then, finally, something happened.The adviser could see information relating to my historical MS90 matter on their system.

    For the first time that day, I was speaking to someone who could read back details connected to the very case I had spent the morning trying to trace.

    I still didn’t have the complete court file, and the information did not resolve the question of whether the conviction was correctly attributed to me.

    But it established a tangible trail.

    There was information in an official system. There were references I could use. The matter was no longer just an old endorsement I was trying to explain.The adviser supplied two enforcement account numbers, each consisting of eight digits followed by a letter.

    As I understood the explanation, the numbers related to different periods of records, one before 2022 and one afterwards.These were not necessarily the original court case numbers or Unique Reference Numbers. But they were identifiers that another department might be able to use to locate the underlying matters.

    That was progress.The next step would be to take those references back to the Single Justice Procedure service and ask it to identify the proceedings associated with them.

    For any conviction of which I genuinely had no knowledge, I also need to establish the appropriate procedure for making a statutory declaration, including whether any application would now be considered late.

    Each case must be identified separately. A single account reference may not tell the whole story.

    Still, after several hours, I finally had something more useful than another telephone number.

    I had a lead.

    And the strangest part was where it had come from.

    The enforcement team — the very part of the system concerned with collecting the consequences of a decision — had been the first to help me trace its origins.

    There is an irony there that even Shakespeare might have appreciated.

    I had spent the morning looking for the beginning of a legal process.It was the people dealing with its ending who could point me backwards.

    Act V: The Law’s Delay

    By nearly 2pm, I was mentally exhausted.

    On paper, I had spent only a few hours making telephone calls.

    In practice, those hours had involved repeated explanations, uncertain departmental boundaries, long periods of forced attention and the constant possibility that each call would lead nowhere.

    I had begun with a simple question: where are the records relating to this conviction?Several hours later, I had two account references and a possible route to obtaining them.

    That might sound like modest progress.To me, it felt like winning a small battle.

    I couldn’t face another call that afternoon.Later that evening, I watched a documentary about Shakespeare and the many actors and directors who have interpreted his plays over the twentieth century.

    There was discussion of Macbeth, among other works, and it reminded me of a line I’d encountered in Hamlet.In the famous “To be, or not to be” speech, Hamlet lists some of the burdens people endure:

    “The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

    The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,

    The insolence of office…”

    The law’s delay.

    There it was.

    Four hundred years ago, Shakespeare was already describing the frustration of waiting for legal processes to deliver something resembling resolution.

    Of course, he wasn’t talking about call centres or automated menus.

    But the underlying experience seems surprisingly familiar.

    The difficulty of obtaining answers. The distance between an individual and an institution. The feeling that the machinery of justice moves according to a timetable entirely unrelated to the urgency of the person caught inside it.

    I had been thinking about the legal system as an engineer.On Monday, I found myself thinking about it as a playwright might.

    A succession of characters entered the scene. Each knew something, but nobody appeared to know the whole story. Each directed me towards another character. The audience — in this case, me — waited for the plot to advance.

    The difficulty was that I wasn’t watching a play.I was trying to find out why my driving licence had been revoked.An Unexpected Lesson

    If anyone reading this is trying to trace an old magistrates’ court matter, particularly one that has reached the stage of enforcement, Monday taught me something worth sharing.

    The court enforcement team may be able to identify historical matters that are difficult to locate through general enquiries.

    That won’t necessarily be true in every case, and enforcement account numbers aren’t substitutes for the original court records.

    But if a matter has been referred for enforcement, it’s worth asking whether the enforcement team can provide references, identify the originating court and explain how to trace the underlying proceedings.

    In my case, it was the first genuinely productive route I found.I still have questions about the MS90 conviction, the notices that may have been issued, the addresses used and the consequences for my driving licence.

    I don’t yet know whether the explanation is an administrative mistake, an incorrectly attributed allegation, a failure of communication or something else.I intend to find out.

    And I intend to document the process, because somebody else may one day find themselves in the same position, facing the same telephone menus and wondering where to begin.

    Perhaps the most frustrating part of Monday wasn’t that nobody wanted to help.

    The people I eventually spoke to generally did try to help.

    It was that the information appeared to be divided between systems, with no obvious route for an ordinary person to discover which one held the answer.

    A system can contain the information you need and still make that information extraordinarily difficult to obtain.

    Shakespeare understood the law’s delay.

    I wonder what he would have made of the hold music.

    To be continued.

  • The Law Is a System, But Life Doesn’t Follow a Specification

    Blog #1 — 11 October 2026

    I’ve spent a considerable amount of time thinking about how systems work.

    In engineering, the starting point is usually a specification. We agree what something is supposed to do, define how its components interact, and establish rules that make the outcome predictable.

    A USB device works because manufacturers agree on a standard. Software communicates through protocols. Machines can be tested against known requirements.

    When something goes wrong, we can ask a relatively straightforward question: did the system behave according to its specification?

    But lately I’ve been wondering what happens when we apply that same way of thinking to human beings.

    Because the law is also a system.

    It has rules, procedures, classifications, deadlines and mechanisms for enforcement. In theory, these allow millions of people to live together under a shared framework.

    The difference is that human lives don’t arrive with specifications.

    A World That Doesn’t Follow the Rules

    An engineer can design a system around known inputs.

    A legal system has to deal with memories, intentions, misunderstandings, changing circumstances, missing information and people who don’t necessarily behave as expected.

    Two people might witness the same event and remember it differently. Someone might move house and never receive a letter. A vehicle might be registered to one person, driven by another and left in the possession of a third.

    The administrative system still needs to produce an answer.

    It needs names, dates, addresses, responsibilities and outcomes.

    But the fact that a situation can be reduced to fields in a database doesn’t mean those fields tell the whole story.

    A record can be complete according to its specification and incomplete according to reality.

    That’s where the engineering analogy begins to get interesting.

    A Mustang on Judge Judy

    I was reminded of this while watching an old episode of Judge Judy involving a Ford Mustang and a test drive that ended badly.

    What interested me wasn’t simply who damaged the car. It was the way the case exposed different layers of responsibility.

    There was the person who drove the vehicle, the person who owned it, the costs of recovering it and the question of what the car was actually worth.

    From a purely mechanical perspective, the problem seemed simple: a car had been damaged.

    But legally, the answer depended on several different questions. Who had the relevant rights? Who was responsible for particular decisions? What loss could actually be established?

    At one point, the discussion turned to the car’s surprisingly low value and the towing and impound costs.

    It struck me that the physical event and the legal consequences were not necessarily the same thing.

    A damaged car is an engineering problem.

    Determining who should pay, and how much, is a problem involving evidence, responsibility and judgment.

    The law has to turn a complicated human event into a decision that can be enforced.

    And that transformation isn’t always straightforward.

    The Difference Between a Rule and Reality

    In engineering, rules are often agreed before the system is built.

    If two components don’t implement the same protocol, they may not communicate. If a machine receives an invalid input, we can design it to reject that input.

    Human society is different.

    The law applies whether or not someone has read every relevant statute or understands every procedure.

    There are good reasons for this. A society couldn’t function if each person could choose which laws applied to them.

    But it creates an unusual relationship between the system and its users.

    We are expected to comply with rules that may be complicated, distributed across multiple institutions and difficult to understand without specialist knowledge.

    And unlike a piece of software, we cannot simply inspect the entire specification before participating.

    We’re already participating.

    When Institutions Become Components

    Modern legal administration increasingly resembles a network of interconnected systems.

    A court makes a decision. Another organisation records its consequences. An enforcement process may then act on that record.

    Each institution has its own responsibilities, procedures and data.

    From an engineering perspective, this sounds familiar. It’s a distributed system.

    And distributed systems introduce a particular problem: one component may trust information received from another without independently verifying how that information was established.

    Imagine an error entering at the beginning.

    The first institution records it. The second receives it. The third acts on it.

    By the end, several organisations may possess records that appear to support the same conclusion.

    But those records aren’t necessarily independent evidence.

    They may all be copies of the same original assumption.

    A mistake doesn’t become true because it has been replicated successfully.

    That seems obvious when talking about software.

    It becomes considerably more important when the records concern human beings.

    The Problem With Perfect Compliance

    There’s a temptation to judge a system by whether it follows its own rules.

    Did the correct form get issued? Was the record transmitted? Did the next department apply the prescribed procedure?

    Those are necessary questions.

    But they aren’t sufficient.

    An institution might follow its procedures correctly while acting on incomplete or inaccurate information.

    This doesn’t mean procedures are pointless. Quite the opposite: procedures protect people from arbitrary decisions.

    It means the quality of a system depends not only on its normal operation but also on what happens when its assumptions are challenged.

    Engineers understand this distinction.

    We test for failures. We build diagnostics. We preserve logs. We design recovery mechanisms.

    We don’t simply declare a machine reliable because it performs well when every input is correct.

    We ask what happens when something unexpected occurs.

    The legal system deserves the same scrutiny.

    Can We Engineer Better Justice?

    My first instinct when I look at administrative complexity is to ask why more of it can’t be automated.

    Why should obtaining a record take weeks? Why should the same information need to be requested from several organisations? Why should someone have to navigate telephone menus just to find out which institution holds a particular document?

    Surely technology could make these things easier.

    And perhaps it can.

    But I’ve also begun to wonder whether automation introduces a different danger.

    If a decision is wrong, making its consequences faster and more efficient isn’t necessarily an improvement.

    A system that can automatically impose a consequence should ideally be equally capable of explaining the decision, preserving its supporting evidence and providing an effective route to challenge it.

    Otherwise, we risk building systems that are exceptionally good at enforcing their conclusions and surprisingly poor at reconsidering them.

    That is not an argument against digitisation.

    It’s an argument for thinking more carefully about what we’re digitising.

    Why I’m Writing This

    These questions are no longer entirely theoretical for me.

    I’m preparing to navigate a legal and administrative process concerning records and decisions that affect me personally.

    Over the coming days, I intend to document that journey here.

    I’ll write about the records I request, the responses I receive, the procedures I encounter and the practical lessons I learn.

    Some of my assumptions may turn out to be wrong. Some apparent inconsistencies may have straightforward explanations. Others may prove more difficult to resolve.

    I’ll try to distinguish carefully between documented facts, personal recollections and unanswered questions.

    This isn’t legal advice, and I don’t intend to turn an unresolved situation into a collection of accusations.

    My hope is that a transparent account of the process might help other people facing similar circumstances.

    And perhaps, along the way, it will reveal something useful about how our institutions work.

    The Specification Is Not the Whole Story

    Engineering has taught us extraordinary things about reliability, consistency and the value of shared rules.

    But human beings are not machines.

    Our circumstances are messy. Our memories are imperfect. Our intentions aren’t always visible. And the information recorded about us isn’t always the whole truth.

    A legal system needs rules to function.

    Yet if those rules are to serve justice, the system must also have room for the unexpected, the disputed and the genuinely mistaken.

    Because a system isn’t truly reliable simply because it follows its specification.

    It must also be capable of recognising when the specification fails to describe reality.

    And, more importantly, it must know what to do next.

  • Idiocracy Got the Future Wrong: What If Humanity Splits Into the Smart and Everyone Else?

    Idiocracy Got the Future Wrong: What If Humanity Splits Into the Smart and Everyone Else?

    Idiocracy opens with one of the film’s most memorable jokes.

    An intelligent, educated couple carefully debates when they should have a child. They worry about finances, careers and whether the timing is right. Years pass. Meanwhile, a spectacularly irresponsible man produces child after child, whose children proceed to do exactly the same thing.

    Fast-forward several centuries and, according to the film, natural selection has done its work backwards: humanity has become catastrophically stupid.

    It is funny.

    But what if Idiocracy got the mechanism wrong?

    What if intelligent people don’t disappear?

    What if they continue having children—perhaps only one or two—but increasingly have those children with other highly intelligent people? And what happens if reproductive technology eventually allows wealthy and technically sophisticated parents not merely to pass on their advantages, but to deliberately amplify them?

    Instead of humanity becoming universally stupid, we might get something much stranger:

    a civilization in which different populations of humans become so cognitively unequal that they begin to seem like different species.

    This isn’t a prediction. Five hundred years is far beyond anything social science or genetics can forecast sensibly.

    But several pieces of the scenario have surprisingly real foundations.

    The Part Idiocracy Misses

    The film essentially imagines intelligence as a single resource gradually being bred out of humanity.

    Real populations are considerably more complicated.

    Intelligence is influenced by both genetic and environmental factors, and neither “intelligence” nor educational success can be reduced to a handful of genes. Research in behavioural genetics indicates substantial genetic influences on cognitive differences while also finding important environmental effects and interactions between the two. Educational attainment likewise reflects cognitive ability, non-cognitive traits and environmental circumstances.

    There’s another important phenomenon: assortative mating.

    People don’t choose partners randomly.

    Among many other characteristics, people tend to partner with others who resemble them educationally and cognitively. A large international meta-analysis covering millions of people across 84 countries found substantial assortative mating for educational attainment, although its strength varied considerably between places and historical periods.

    Research has also reported substantial spouse correlations for intelligence. One widely cited review estimated a correlation of roughly 0.4 for intelligence, considerably higher than that observed for many personality traits.

    Genetic studies complicate the picture further. Partners can also show similarity in genetic variants associated with educational attainment, although that does not mean people are consciously choosing partners based on “education genes.” Social class, geography, institutions, personality and other correlated characteristics can all contribute to who meets and partners with whom. Recent research emphasizes precisely this mixture of genetic and social processes.

    That distinction is important.

    Our hypothetical future doesn’t require a secret caste of geniuses selectively breeding.

    The sorting could happen largely by itself.

    Now Add Reproductive Technology

    This is where the scenario begins departing dramatically from the world of Idiocracy.

    Imagine the year 2150.

    IVF is routine. Embryos can be screened for enormous numbers of genetic variants. Gene editing is safer than it is today. Artificial gametes may allow reproduction under circumstances impossible today. AI systems predict developmental outcomes.

    Some of those technologies remain speculative, but one primitive version of this future already exists: polygenic embryo screening.

    Rather than testing an embryo for a single disease-causing mutation, polygenic screening attempts to estimate probabilities associated with complex traits or diseases using many genetic variants.

    The technology has major limitations. Polygenic scores are probabilistic rather than deterministic, complex traits involve environment as well as genetics, embryos from the same parents have limited genetic variation to choose among, and selecting for one characteristic can have unexpected relationships with others. Researchers have therefore urged considerable caution, particularly concerning psychiatric and cognitive traits.

    The American Society for Reproductive Medicine’s 2026 ethics opinion similarly states that polygenic embryo testing should not currently be used for non-medical trait selection.

    But our thought experiment concerns 2526, not 2026.

    Suppose those limitations gradually diminish.

    Then something historically unprecedented becomes possible.

    Parents don’t merely transmit their genes.

    They begin choosing among—and eventually modifying—the genetic possibilities available to their children.

    Intelligence Becomes an Investment

    At first, enhancement would probably be expensive.

    That matters enormously.

    Imagine that wealthy parents can afford superior prenatal medicine, sophisticated embryo selection, personalized AI education, neural interfaces and eventually safe genetic modifications affecting cognition.

    Their children inherit wealth.

    They inherit educational advantages.

    They inherit social connections.

    But now they potentially inherit deliberately selected biological advantages as well.

    Those children disproportionately meet and reproduce with similarly advantaged people.

    The process repeats.

    You have created a feedback loop:

    cognitive advantage → economic advantage → access to enhancement → enhanced offspring → greater cognitive advantage.

    Research into the ethics of polygenic embryo screening already identifies unequal access, discrimination, reproductive autonomy and justice as major concerns—even while today’s technology remains extremely limited. A 2026 scoping review of the literature identified unequal access, stigmatization and potential demographic consequences among the recurring ethical concerns.

    Now imagine those forces operating for centuries.

    The Great Cognitive Divergence

    Jump forward to 2526.

    There are still billions of ordinary humans.

    Importantly, they aren’t necessarily stupid.

    They might be healthier, better educated and technologically more capable than we are.

    But perhaps a tiny fraction of humanity has undergone generations of deliberate enhancement.

    Their brains develop differently.

    Their working memory is vastly greater.

    Neural implants provide effectively perfect recall.

    AI systems are integrated directly into their cognition.

    They routinely live for centuries and consequently accumulate 150 years of education and professional experience.

    The distinction between the populations would no longer resemble the difference between someone with an IQ of 100 and someone with an IQ of 140.

    It might resemble the cognitive difference between species.

    Biologically they might still be capable of interbreeding. Strictly speaking, they therefore wouldn’t necessarily constitute different species.

    Socially and psychologically, however, they could inhabit completely different worlds.

    And that’s when the interesting problems begin.

    Problem One: Democracy Becomes Awkward

    Imagine that humanity is debating whether to construct a self-replicating industrial network around Mercury.

    Understanding the proposal requires advanced knowledge of orbital mechanics, artificial intelligence, economics, materials science and risk modelling.

    An enhanced citizen can genuinely understand the arguments.

    Most ordinary citizens cannot.

    Yet everyone possesses one vote.

    The enhanced population begins asking:

    Why should people who cannot understand these decisions have equal authority over them?

    Ordinary humanity responds with an equally reasonable question:

    Why should being smarter give you the right to rule us?

    Democracy has always had to reconcile differences in knowledge and expertise. But enormous engineered cognitive inequality would turn that old problem into something qualitatively different.

    The most disturbing outcome might not even be dictatorship.

    It could be benevolent technocracy.

    The enhanced administrators really do make better decisions.

    Infrastructure works.

    Disease declines.

    The economy functions.

    Wars become rarer.

    And consequently it becomes increasingly difficult to argue that ordinary people should have meaningful control over the civilization in which they live.

    Problem Two: Language Begins To Separate

    Human language is constrained partly by what human brains can comfortably process.

    Suppose an enhanced human can simultaneously manipulate dozens of complicated concepts in working memory.

    Their communication might become correspondingly complicated.

    Perhaps neural interfaces eventually allow people to transmit conceptual structures that ordinary spoken language cannot efficiently represent.

    Enhanced people develop their own vocabulary.

    Then their own grammar.

    Then perhaps something that barely resembles language as we understand it.

    Ordinary humans can still learn simplified versions of it, just as people today can learn some advanced mathematics.

    But they cannot truly think in it at full complexity.

    Eventually the elite maintain a simplified language specifically for communicating with ordinary humans.

    That would be socially poisonous.

    Imagine knowing that every government announcement, scientific explanation and philosophical argument you encounter has effectively been translated into Human: Beginner Level.

    Problem Three: They Stop Wanting To Talk To Us

    This might be more consequential than any law.

    Imagine possessing extraordinary working memory, near-perfect recall and a 300-year lifespan.

    At age ten, you have mastered material that currently requires postgraduate education.

    At 50, you have accumulated decades of intellectual experience.

    At 200, you’ve lived through several ordinary human lifetimes.

    What does an ordinary conversation feel like?

    Perhaps painfully slow.

    Perhaps repetitive.

    Perhaps charming—but in the way adults sometimes find conversations with children charming.

    The enhanced population might genuinely care about ordinary humanity.

    They might defend our rights.

    They might love human art and history.

    But caring about someone isn’t necessarily the same thing as regarding them as your intellectual peer.

    That psychological separation could matter enormously.

    Problem Four: Love Creates a Caste System

    Nobody needs to pass a law prohibiting intermarriage.

    People simply choose partners with whom they can communicate most easily.

    Enhanced people disproportionately form relationships with enhanced people.

    Ordinary humans disproportionately partner with ordinary humans.

    Their children inherit both the technological and social advantages of their parents.

    After generations, intermarriage becomes unusual.

    A caste system has appeared without anyone deliberately creating one.

    This is an exaggerated extrapolation, but the starting mechanism isn’t imaginary: substantial assortative mating by education already exists today.

    Technology simply turns an existing social tendency into something far more powerful.

    Problem Five: 0.1% of Humanity Runs Civilization

    The enhanced population wouldn’t necessarily need to be large.

    Suppose ordinary humanity numbers 15 billion.

    There are only 15 million extreme cognitive elites.

    That’s 0.1 percent of humanity.

    But imagine that this tiny population performs most fundamental scientific research, controls the most advanced AI systems, operates interplanetary infrastructure and owns enormous quantities of capital.

    Humanity has recreated aristocracy.

    Except there is one deeply uncomfortable difference.

    The aristocrats of the past generally claimed inherent superiority.

    This new aristocracy might possess demonstrable cognitive abilities that most people genuinely cannot match.

    That does not establish a moral right to rule.

    But it makes the political argument much more difficult than overthrowing a duke whose principal qualification was having the correct grandfather.

    Problem Six: What Does “Equality” Mean Anymore?

    Modern societies generally distinguish moral equality from equality of ability.

    People obviously differ in strength, intelligence, health and talent, but those differences don’t determine whether someone counts as a person.

    Extreme enhancement would stress that principle.

    Suppose an enhanced person lives for 500 years.

    Does killing that person represent the same loss as killing someone expecting to live another 50?

    Suppose another enhancement allows someone to experience subjective time ten times faster than normal.

    Should a ten-year prison sentence be measured according to external time or experienced time?

    Suppose an artificial or heavily modified human can simultaneously sustain several streams of conscious thought.

    Is that one legal person?

    The concept of universal human rights survives fairly easily when humans occupy broadly similar ranges of capability.

    It becomes philosophically stranger once “human” includes minds radically unlike one another.

    Problem Seven: Ordinary Humanity Becomes Economically Unnecessary

    Artificial intelligence alone raises questions about technological unemployment.

    Now add cognitively enhanced humans working alongside that AI.

    One enhanced scientist might perform work that once required hundreds of ordinary researchers.

    Ordinary humans aren’t merely competing with machines.

    They’re competing with machine-assisted posthumans.

    Eventually most ordinary people may not need to work.

    Materially, that could be wonderful.

    Energy is abundant. Machines manufacture necessities. Medicine is extraordinary. Poverty in the traditional sense barely exists.

    Yet something psychologically devastating has happened.

    Billions of people know civilization doesn’t particularly need their contribution.

    The political demand of the future therefore might not be:

    “Give us more wealth.”

    It might be:

    “Give us something meaningful to do.”

    Problem Eight: The Anti-Enhancement Movement

    Not everyone would participate.

    Religious groups might reject genetic modification.

    Political movements might insist upon preserving baseline humanity.

    Some communities might regard neural implants as destroying authentic consciousness.

    Others might permit disease prevention but prohibit cognitive enhancement.

    They might proudly call themselves Naturals, Baselines or simply Humans.

    Then society encounters an extraordinarily difficult question.

    Suppose enhancement becomes safe and genuinely beneficial.

    If parents can give their child vastly improved memory, health and lifespan, is refusing enhancement an exercise of parental freedom?

    Or is it denying a child opportunities?

    Today’s bioethics literature already wrestles with much more modest versions of questions involving reproductive autonomy, justice, disability, eugenics and the welfare of future children.

    Five centuries of technological progress wouldn’t necessarily solve those disagreements.

    It might make them explosive.

    Problem Nine: There Isn’t Just One “Superior Human”

    Perhaps the strangest possibility is that humanity doesn’t divide into two groups at all.

    It divides into dozens.

    One population optimizes mathematical cognition.

    Another emphasizes emotional cognition and social coordination.

    Another adapts itself for life in low gravity.

    Another prioritizes longevity.

    Another integrates extensively with artificial intelligence.

    Another abandons biological bodies almost entirely.

    Meanwhile, traditionalist populations deliberately remain genetically close to historical Homo sapiens.

    Human evolution stops looking like a ladder:

    Homo sapiens → Homo superior

    and starts looking like a tree.

    After enough time, inhabitants of Mars, virtual civilizations and genetically conservative Earth communities might have almost nothing in common beyond ancestry.

    “Humanity” becomes less a biological category than a political alliance between descendants of the same species.

    Problem Ten: The Human Zoo

    There is one final possibility that might be darker than open dictatorship.

    The enhanced don’t conquer ordinary humanity.

    They manage it.

    Their understanding of psychology, economics and social systems is so sophisticated that direct coercion is unnecessary.

    They design algorithms that subtly encourage desirable behaviour.

    They structure economic incentives.

    They construct cities to influence social interaction.

    They curate information environments to discourage dangerous political movements.

    Ordinary people continue voting.

    They have freedom of speech.

    They choose careers and partners.

    Nobody tells them what to do.

    But the enhanced population understands their behaviour so well that society has effectively become a managed ecosystem.

    A human zoo.

    And the inhabitants don’t know there are zookeepers.

    The disturbing part is that the keepers might sincerely be benevolent.

    But What If the “Inferior” Humans Have Something the Geniuses Don’t?

    There is one final reversal worth considering.

    Optimization creates trade-offs.

    Today’s polygenic research already warns against imagining complex traits as independent sliders that can simply be turned up and down. Genetic variants can influence multiple characteristics, and complex traits emerge from interactions among enormous numbers of genes and environmental factors.

    Perhaps centuries of optimizing humans for intelligence gradually reduce characteristics nobody realized were important.

    Spontaneity.

    Risk-taking.

    Unusual cognitive variation.

    Certain forms of creativity.

    Emotional intensity.

    Tolerance for disorder.

    Perhaps the enhanced population becomes extraordinarily good at rationally exploring solutions inside existing conceptual frameworks—and increasingly bad at producing the lunatic who asks whether the entire framework is wrong.

    Their civilization becomes fantastically sophisticated.

    And fantastically brittle.

    Then some unprecedented catastrophe occurs.

    The greatest minds humanity has ever produced cannot solve it because they all share assumptions deliberately selected into their civilization over hundreds of years.

    And somewhere outside that civilization exists a population of unmodified humans.

    Messy.

    Impulsive.

    Inefficient.

    Unpredictable.

    Exactly the traits civilization spent centuries eliminating.

    And one of them comes up with an idea that nobody else would.

    Idiocracy in Reverse

    That may be the more interesting version of Idiocracy.

    Humanity doesn’t become stupid.

    Humanity becomes unequal in ways we have never previously encountered.

    The ordinary people of 2526 might be perfectly intelligent by our standards. They may simply inhabit a civilization whose most advanced institutions have become incomprehensible to them.

    Above—or perhaps merely apart from—them exists a small population produced through centuries of assortative mating, accumulated wealth, reproductive technology, artificial intelligence and eventually deliberate biological enhancement.

    They aren’t gods.

    They aren’t necessarily villains.

    They may genuinely want what is best for everyone.

    And that’s precisely what makes the scenario interesting.

    Because the ultimate political question would no longer be simply whether everyone deserves equal rights.

    It would be:

    Who should determine humanity’s future when some humans can understand that future vastly better than others?

    And perhaps the question after that is even more important:

    At what point do those people stop thinking of the rest of us as “us”?

    Further Reading

    For readers interested in the real science behind the speculation:

    Plomin & Deary (2015), “Genetics and intelligence differences: five special findings.” A review discussing genetic research on intelligence, including evidence concerning assortative mating.

    Sunde, Eilertsen & Torvik (2025), “Understanding indirect assortative mating and its intergenerational consequences for educational attainment.” A large Norwegian family study examining genetic and social mechanisms underlying partner similarity in education.

    Robinson et al. (2017), “Genetic evidence of assortative mating in humans.” Research using genetic data to investigate assortative mating across human traits, including educational attainment.

    Lázaro-Muñoz et al. (2021), “Screening embryos for polygenic conditions and traits: ethical considerations for an emerging technology.” An introduction to some of the ethical questions surrounding polygenic embryo screening.

    Lencz et al. (2022), “Concerns about the use of polygenic embryo screening for psychiatric and cognitive traits.” A useful discussion of why present-day polygenic prediction should not be mistaken for a reliable “intelligence selector.”

    Screening embryos for polygenic disease risk (2024), Human Reproduction Update. A broad review of epidemiological, clinical and ethical issues surrounding embryo screening.

    American Society for Reproductive Medicine (2026), Ethics Committee opinion on PGT-P. A useful snapshot of the present professional position: possible medical applications are being debated, while non-medical trait selection is not considered an appropriate current use.

    This article is a speculative thought experiment, not a prediction of future human evolution. Current genetic technologies cannot reliably engineer the kind of cognitive divergence described here, and intelligence is a complex product of genetic, developmental, environmental and cultural factors.

  • When Prison Stops Being a Deterrent: A Problem Britain Needs to Confront

    When Prison Stops Being a Deterrent: A Problem Britain Needs to Confront

    The British criminal justice system rests partly on a simple assumption: punishment discourages crime.

    For many people, the prospect of arrest, prosecution, a criminal record and imprisonment is an enormous deterrent. Losing a job, a home, relationships, freedom and reputation represents a potentially catastrophic consequence.

    But what happens when those consequences no longer frighten someone?

    This is an uncomfortable question that deserves considerably more attention in the United Kingdom.

    Prison is already dealing with persistent offending

    The problem should not be exaggerated into a claim that most offenders are indifferent to prison. The available evidence does not establish that.

    What the statistics do establish is that repeat offending remains substantial.

    Ministry of Justice figures for the April–June 2024 offender cohort recorded a proven reoffending rate of 29.6%. Approximately 25,000 proven reoffenders within that cohort were responsible for almost 131,000 proven reoffences during the measurement period. Those who reoffended averaged 5.13 proven reoffences each — the highest figure in that statistical series.

    That distinction matters.

    The challenge is not simply the number of people who reoffend. It is the concentration of repeated offending among a smaller population.

    The person with little left to lose

    For somebody with a career, mortgage, stable family life and reputation to protect, even a relatively short prison sentence can carry enormous secondary consequences.

    Another person may approach exactly the same punishment from a completely different position.

    Someone who has spent years moving between unstable accommodation, unemployment, addiction, offending and custody may perceive prison very differently. Previous imprisonment may also make the environment familiar rather than unknown.

    That does not mean such people want to go to prison. Nor should poverty, addiction or homelessness be confused with criminality.

    The narrower point is that deterrence depends partly upon what an individual believes they stand to lose.

    When conventional society has already become disconnected from someone’s life, conventional punishment can lose some of its leverage.

    Simply making prison harsher is not the obvious answer

    The instinctive response might be: if offenders aren’t sufficiently afraid of prison, make prison more severe.

    The evidence provides good reason to question that approach.

    The Sentencing Council’s review of sentencing effectiveness concluded that there is no strong evidence supporting increasingly severe sentences on the basis of general deterrence. Research on deterrence distinguishes between the severity, certainty and speed of punishment.

    This produces an important distinction for public policy.

    A hypothetical offender who believes there is only a small chance of being caught may not be greatly influenced by whether the eventual sentence is two years or three. Increasing the perceived probability that offending will actually produce consequences may matter more than continually increasing the maximum severity of those consequences.

    The objective therefore should not simply be to make people more frightened of prison.

    It should be to make persistent offending less attractive and lawful life more valuable.

    Britain’s prisons are already under considerable pressure

    This is not an abstract problem.

    There were 85,858 prisoners in England and Wales on 30 June 2026. Operational prison capacity was reported at 89,120 in June.

    Government projections published in 2025 estimated that the prison population could reach between 98,000 and 103,600 by March 2030, with a central projection of approximately 100,600.

    The prison estate therefore cannot sustainably answer every criminal-justice problem simply by demanding more imprisonment.

    Almost a quarter of prisoners were held in crowded accommodation during 2024–25.

    A system operating under those pressures must ask what it is trying to achieve with every prison place.

    Punishment and rehabilitation are not opposites

    Public debate sometimes presents two competing philosophies.

    One says offenders should be punished.

    The other says offenders should be rehabilitated.

    English and Welsh sentencing law does not actually require such a binary choice. The recognised purposes of sentencing include punishment, reducing crime including through deterrence, rehabilitation, protection of the public and reparation.

    That is sensible.

    There are offenders from whom the public genuinely needs protection, making imprisonment necessary.

    But if someone will eventually return to society, the condition in which that person returns matters enormously.

    A prisoner who leaves custody with no accommodation, no legitimate income, untreated addiction, few employable skills and the same criminal associates has been punished — but many of the circumstances associated with their offending remain.

    By contrast, someone leaving with stable accommodation, employable skills, treatment where appropriate and something meaningful to lose has acquired additional reasons not to return.

    Rehabilitation can therefore itself become a form of deterrence.

    The objective should be to create something worth losing

    Perhaps one of the most important questions in criminal justice is not:

    “How do we make prison frightening enough?”

    It is:

    “How do we make freedom valuable enough?”

    Employment matters.

    Housing matters.

    Treatment for addiction and mental illness matters.

    Family relationships matter.

    Education matters.

    The realistic probability of being caught matters.

    Effective probation and supervision matter.

    And where somebody presents a genuine danger to others, incapacitation and public protection matter.

    None of these principles requires society to excuse criminal behaviour. Understanding why punishment sometimes fails is not the same as absolving the person who committed the offence.

    Indeed, taking repeat offending seriously requires asking whether our interventions actually prevent the next victim rather than merely expressing society’s anger about the previous one.

    A criminal justice system needs more than fear

    Britain faces a difficult problem when dealing with persistent offenders for whom imprisonment has become familiar and conventional deterrents have weakened.

    But the solution cannot simply be an endless competition to devise harsher punishment.

    A functioning criminal justice system needs credible enforcement, proportionate punishment and protection of the public. It also needs credible routes back into ordinary society.

    The most successful outcome is not an offender who leaves prison terrified of returning.

    It is an offender who leaves prison with compelling reasons never to return.

    That distinction should be at the centre of Britain’s debate about prisons, sentencing and rehabilitation.

  • When Progress Runs Backwards: Turkey and the Uneven History of LGBT Acceptance

    When Progress Runs Backwards: Turkey and the Uneven History of LGBT Acceptance

    It is tempting to imagine social progress as a straight line. A society becomes more tolerant, laws become more liberal, previously marginalised people become more visible, and eventually an old prejudice recedes into history.

    The reality is considerably messier.

    The recent crackdown on LGBT people and organisations in Turkey provides a striking example. In September 2026, Turkish authorities launched a nationwide operation targeting LGBT organisations, activists and some businesses and venues. According to Justice Minister Akın Gürlek, investigations encompassed 162 suspects, nine associations and 13 businesses across 15 provinces. Police raided association offices and other premises, websites and social-media accounts were blocked, and dozens of people were detained or jailed pending trial. Authorities described the operation as “My Family is Safe” and said it was intended to protect children, the family and public order. Human-rights organisations and the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights have strongly criticised the crackdown and questioned the use of such justifications for restrictions on civil society and expression.

    The events did not emerge from nowhere. Istanbul Pride has been banned since 2015, and LGBT demonstrations have repeatedly encountered bans, arrests and police intervention. During 2025, which President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government designated the “Year of the Family,” authorities adopted further measures criticised by human-rights organisations as targeting LGBT people. Human Rights Watch reported restrictions on terminology concerning sexual orientation and gender identity and continuing censorship and restrictions on Pride events.

    The September 2026 operation nevertheless represents a significant escalation. Raids extended beyond demonstrations into the organisational infrastructure of LGBT civil society and reportedly included nightlife venues and other workplaces. Access restrictions affected LGBT organisations and media, while subsequent demonstrations against the raids themselves resulted in further detentions.

    At first sight, developments like these appear to contradict the idea that LGBT acceptance has advanced over the past several decades.

    But that contradiction disappears once we abandon the idea that historical change must move smoothly in one direction.

    Progress has more than one timescale

    Imagine a society’s level of LGBT acceptance represented by a hypothetical sequence:

    20 → 30 → 45 → 60 → 70 → 62 → 65

    Someone looking at the entire period sees an enormous long-term increase.

    Someone living through the fall from 70 to 62 experiences a genuine reversal.

    Neither person is mistaken.

    This is an important distinction because phrases such as “LGBT rights are advancing” can accidentally trivialise what happens during periods of regression. Someone whose organisation has been raided, whose demonstration has been prohibited or who has been detained does not experience their situation as an insignificant wobble on an upward graph.

    The backward movement is real.

    What remains uncertain is whether it represents a lasting change in historical direction.

    Progress creates things that are difficult to completely undo

    Social change is not simply a collection of laws.

    It also changes institutions, expectations, relationships and people’s understanding of what is normal.

    Consider what happens when LGBT people become increasingly visible. More people discover that a sibling, colleague, child, neighbour or friend is gay or transgender. Organisations form. Communities acquire physical spaces and cultural traditions. Lawyers develop expertise. Journalists begin covering LGBT issues. Political arguments that once seemed almost unimaginable become familiar.

    A government can change legislation or close an organisation considerably faster than it can erase all of those social consequences.

    This creates something resembling a ratchet—but an imperfect one.

    The ratchet can slip backwards. Sometimes it can slip very far. Rights that seemed secure can disappear, organisations can be dismantled and public attitudes can deteriorate.

    Yet society does not necessarily return to precisely the place from which it started.

    Turkey demonstrates this paradox particularly vividly. The very existence of established LGBT organisations, Pride traditions, community venues, advocacy networks and public protests against repression demonstrates how much social infrastructure developed before the current crackdown. The government’s ability to restrict that infrastructure is evidence of regression; the infrastructure’s existence in the first place is evidence of an earlier transformation.

    Those two realities can coexist.

    Backlash can actually be evidence that something changed

    There is another uncomfortable feature of social change: backlash frequently occurs because a previously marginal phenomenon has become sufficiently visible to provoke organised opposition.

    That does not mean backlash is secretly beneficial. Repression can cause enormous harm, and there is no historical law saying that its victims will eventually prevail.

    But it does mean that backlash and previous progress are not opposites in quite the way they initially appear.

    A movement can progress from being largely invisible, to visible, to institutionally established—and consequently become important enough that opponents organise specifically against it.

    Turkey’s official rhetoric is revealing in this respect. The current campaign has been explicitly framed around protecting “family” and children. Authorities say the measures concern obscenity, prostitution, child protection and public order; rights organisations argue that these concepts are being used to suppress legitimate LGBT civil society and expression.

    Whichever interpretation one adopts, the political conflict itself demonstrates that LGBT visibility has become an established question in Turkish public life rather than something society simply never discusses.

    But there is no guaranteed happy ending

    This is where the metaphor of “winning little battles until the war is won” becomes dangerous.

    History has no automatic victory condition.

    A backlash can last five years. It can last fifty. Institutions can disappear. Generations can grow up under different social conditions. A sufficiently sustained reversal can eventually destroy some of the cultural and institutional gains that initially seemed difficult to undo.

    Nor does every LGBT issue necessarily travel in the same direction. Acceptance of gay and lesbian relationships, same-sex marriage, freedom of association, transgender healthcare, legal recognition of gender, education and questions surrounding children can follow quite different political trajectories.

    There is therefore no single dial labelled LGBT progress that moves neatly forwards and backwards.

    There are dozens of interacting dials.

    History looks different depending on where you stand

    Perhaps the most useful way of thinking about all this is to imagine history operating simultaneously at three scales.

    At the scale of days and months, there are raids, demonstrations, court decisions, elections and policy changes.

    At the scale of years, societies experience political cycles: liberalisation, reaction, polarisation, consolidation and sometimes renewed liberalisation—or further restriction.

    And at the scale of generations, much deeper transformations can become visible.

    The mistake is assuming that movement at one scale tells us automatically what is happening at another.

    Turkey in September 2026 is experiencing a substantial crackdown on LGBT civil society. Calling that merely a temporary bump would go beyond what the evidence can tell us. Nobody yet knows how far the campaign will go, how long it will last, or what its enduring consequences will be.

    But neither does the crackdown erase the historical process that preceded it.

    That gives us a more nuanced version of the idea that began this discussion:

    Progress is cumulative, but it is not inevitable.

    Each period of liberalisation changes the society in which the next conflict occurs. Some of those changes survive subsequent reversals; others do not. Consequently, when another period of change begins, it may begin from a different baseline than the one before it.

    History therefore resembles neither a triumphant march forward nor an endless circle.

    It is closer to a long, irregular path: advances, reactions, settlements, renewed conflicts and occasionally profound reversals—while underneath them, slower changes in culture and institutions may continue accumulating.

    Turkey’s current crackdown belongs to the backward-moving part of that story.

    Whether it eventually becomes a temporary reversal within a longer transformation, or the beginning of a much deeper and more durable change in direction, can only be answered by what happens next.

  • Are Older Places Happier?

    Are Older Places Happier?

    Testing the relationship between age, deprivation and well-being in Britain

    Walk through different parts of Britain and an apparent pattern can be difficult to ignore.

    Many places with conspicuously young populations are dense urban areas: expensive housing, heavy traffic, smaller living spaces, greater population turnover and, in some cases, substantial deprivation. Meanwhile, many older communities are found in smaller towns, rural districts and coastal areas that can appear quieter, greener and more settled.

    It raises an intriguing question:

    Do places with older populations actually tend to be happier?

    And, if they do, is age itself responsible — or are age and happiness both consequences of something else?

    The available evidence suggests that the observation deserves to be taken seriously. But it also shows why a simple conclusion such as “older places are happier because older people are happier” would be misleading.

    The first clue: Britain’s age geography is extraordinary

    The age profile of the UK varies dramatically from place to place.

    According to the 2021 Census, the median age across England and Wales was 40. London was considerably younger, at 35, while the South West had a median age of 44.

    The differences become much larger at local-authority level. Tower Hamlets had a median age of just 30. Nottingham, Cambridge, Oxford and Manchester were all around 31.

    At the other end of the spectrum, North Norfolk’s median resident was 54, Rother’s 53 and East Lindsey’s 52.

    Universities explain part of this pattern, but not all of it. Britain’s major cities attract young adults for education and employment, while many rural and coastal areas contain much larger retired populations.

    The country therefore provides a natural setting in which to ask whether the age of a place is associated with the wellbeing of the people living there.

    There is evidence for the pattern

    An Office for National Statistics analysis of English local authorities provides particularly interesting evidence.

    ONS grouped local authorities according to four measures of personal wellbeing: life satisfaction, happiness, anxiety and whether people felt the things they did in life were worthwhile.

    One cluster contained 74 local authorities that were below the median on all four wellbeing measures.

    Of those authorities:

    • 88% were urban;
    • 62% had a median age of 40 or younger; and
    • 34% were among the more deprived local authorities.

    London was heavily represented: 56% of London’s local authorities fell into this cluster.

    A second cluster, which performed below the median for happiness, life satisfaction and worthwhile feelings, was again disproportionately young and deprived.

    So the geographical pattern is not simply anecdotal. Official statistics have detected an association between poorer wellbeing, younger local populations, urbanity and deprivation.

    But that last sentence contains the central problem.

    All four characteristics occur together.

    Correlation is not explanation

    Imagine plotting every local authority on a graph.

    On one axis is its median age. On the other is its average happiness score.

    If older authorities tend to appear higher on the happiness scale, we have discovered a correlation.

    We have not demonstrated that the age of the population caused the difference.

    A younger area may simultaneously have:

    higher housing costs, more renters, greater population density, more unemployment or economic insecurity, more students, lower home ownership, greater population turnover, different household structures, different health outcomes and greater deprivation.

    An older area may simultaneously have:

    more homeowners, more retirees, lower population density, greater residential stability, more green space and a completely different socioeconomic composition.

    Age could therefore be acting partly as a marker for the type of place being observed.

    This distinction is crucial.

    The proposition we really need to test is not:

    “Are older places happier?”

    It is:

    “After accounting for deprivation, urbanisation, employment, health and other relevant characteristics, is the age structure of a place still associated with its reported wellbeing?”

    That is a much harder and much more interesting question.

    The individual-level evidence complicates the story

    There is another reason not to interpret the geographical relationship too quickly.

    At the individual level, happiness does not simply increase with age.

    ONS research using more than 300,000 UK adults found a broadly curved relationship.

    Happiness and life satisfaction were relatively high among younger adults, declined through adulthood, reached their lowest levels during middle age, and subsequently increased substantially.

    People aged approximately 65–79 reported some of the highest levels of personal wellbeing.

    At still older ages, wellbeing began to decline again.

    In other words, the relationship resembles a distorted U or S-shaped curve rather than a straight line from unhappy youth to happy old age.

    This matters enormously.

    If young people themselves are not uniformly unhappy, yet younger places sometimes record poorer wellbeing, something about the characteristics of those places may be contributing to the association.

    Deprivation is the obvious suspect

    The strongest competing explanation is socioeconomic deprivation.

    Deprivation can affect many of the things that plausibly influence everyday wellbeing: housing, employment, crime, health, environmental quality and financial security.

    England’s official Index of Multiple Deprivation combines seven domains:

    income; employment; education, skills and training; health and disability; crime; barriers to housing and services; and the living environment.

    The 2025 English Indices of Deprivation show that deprivation remains heavily geographically concentrated, although deprived neighbourhoods exist across much of the country.

    Middlesbrough, Birmingham, Hartlepool, Kingston upon Hull and Manchester were among the local-authority districts containing the highest proportions of neighbourhoods in England’s most deprived group.

    Some of those places also have comparatively young populations.

    That creates a classic confounding problem.

    Suppose younger local authorities have lower average happiness.

    Suppose younger local authorities are also more deprived.

    And suppose deprivation independently reduces wellbeing.

    The apparent relationship between age and happiness could therefore actually be substantially a relationship between deprivation and happiness.

    Health introduces another complication

    Health strongly influences subjective wellbeing, and health itself varies dramatically with both age and deprivation.

    ONS Census analysis found substantially better self-reported health in England’s least deprived areas than its most deprived areas.

    Importantly, this difference exists even among young people.

    Among 15–19-year-olds, 64.2% of those living in the most deprived areas reported very good health, compared with 75.9% in the least deprived areas.

    The deprivation gap became considerably larger through middle age.

    This makes it dangerous to treat population age as an isolated explanatory variable.

    Age, health, wealth, employment and geography interact.

    There’s also an ecological fallacy waiting for us

    Perhaps the most important statistical trap is assuming that characteristics of an area necessarily describe the individuals living within it.

    Imagine that a seaside authority has:

    median age: 52
    average happiness: 7.8

    while a city authority has:

    median age: 31
    average happiness: 7.2

    It would be tempting to conclude that the older residents are responsible for the higher score.

    But those figures alone cannot tell us that.

    It is entirely possible that the 30-year-olds living in the older authority are happier than the 30-year-olds living in the younger authority.

    If that happened, the important variable might not be how old you are.

    It might be where and under what conditions you live.

    This is known as the ecological fallacy: relationships observed between populations cannot automatically be assumed to describe relationships between individuals.

    A particularly useful piece of ONS evidence

    ONS has already performed an analysis that demonstrates why age adjustment matters.

    It has published both age-standardised and non-age-standardised local-authority wellbeing estimates.

    Age standardisation asks, approximately:

    What would the comparison between these places look like if their different population age structures were accounted for?

    That provides one way of separating the demographic composition of an area from its underlying wellbeing.

    ONS has also examined correlations between local wellbeing and deprivation.

    These datasets provide the ingredients for a much stronger test than simply comparing a few young cities with a few retirement areas.

    How the hypothesis should actually be tested

    A serious analysis should begin with every comparable local authority rather than selecting conspicuous examples.

    For each authority we would collect:

    Median age

    from ONS population estimates.

    Happiness and life satisfaction

    from the ONS Annual Population Survey personal-wellbeing data.

    Deprivation

    from the relevant national deprivation indices.

    Ideally, additional variables would include population density, urban/rural classification, employment, health, housing affordability, home ownership and student population.

    The first calculation is straightforward:

    median age ↔ happiness

    and separately:

    median age ↔ life satisfaction.

    That establishes the raw geographical correlation.

    The second stage is much more important.

    We then estimate the relationship after accounting for deprivation and the other characteristics.

    Conceptually:

    Wellbeing = age structure + deprivation + urbanity + health + employment + housing + other factors

    If the association with median age remains substantial after those controls, the proposition that there is something independently important about the age structure of communities becomes considerably more interesting.

    If it largely disappears, a different conclusion follows:

    young population was functioning as a proxy for other characteristics of disadvantaged urban areas.

    Either result would be informative.

    Reasons the apparent relationship might survive

    There are plausible mechanisms through which population age structure itself could matter.

    Older populations may have greater residential stability. People may have lived near neighbours for longer, producing stronger community networks.

    Areas dominated by families and older residents may also develop different public spaces, businesses and services from places dominated by transient young adults.

    Retirement removes commuting and employment pressures for some people. Older homeowners may have lower housing costs after paying down mortgages.

    There may also be selection effects: people with sufficient resources can choose to retire to attractive rural or coastal areas.

    In that case, however, the pleasant environment may partly explain the happiness rather than age itself.

    Reasons the hypothesis might fail

    There are equally powerful counterexamples.

    University cities are exceptionally young because thousands of generally healthy young adults arrive every year. Their low median age tells us very little about deprivation.

    Cambridge and Oxford illustrate the problem particularly well: both had median ages around 31 in the 2021 Census.

    Conversely, an ageing population can sometimes result from younger residents leaving an area because employment opportunities are limited.

    Some older coastal communities also experience serious deprivation, poor health and social isolation.

    And among the oldest individuals, average wellbeing eventually declines.

    So neither youth nor age is intrinsically a reliable measure of whether somewhere is flourishing.

    What can reasonably be concluded?

    There is credible evidence for the observation that prompted this investigation:

    some of Britain’s younger urban local authorities also exhibit poorer wellbeing and greater deprivation, while a number of older, less urban authorities perform better on wellbeing measures.

    ONS’s own clustering analysis detected essentially this combination of characteristics.

    But the evidence does not justify the stronger statement:

    “Places are happier because their populations are older.”

    The demographic variable is entangled with deprivation, urbanisation, health, housing, employment and migration.

    Indeed, that may be the more interesting discovery.

    The question may not ultimately be why older people make places happier.

    It may be why Britain has produced a geography in which youth, urbanisation, housing pressure and deprivation so often overlap, while some older populations are concentrated in quieter and more economically secure environments.

    Age may be part of the story.

    Or it may be the clue that leads us to the real one.

    The next test

    The hypothesis can now be made falsifiable.

    Take every UK local authority for which comparable data are available.

    Plot median age against happiness and life satisfaction.

    Measure the correlation.

    Then progressively control for deprivation, health, employment, housing and urbanisation.

    If age continues to predict wellbeing after those adjustments, we have evidence of an independent relationship worth explaining.

    If it does not, then the original observation was still useful — but what it revealed was not an age effect.

    It revealed the socioeconomic geography hiding underneath it.