I have read that UK citizens are already bored by the general election. Before you have glazed over entirely, let me offer some insights into the corner that concerns me: the junction of law and Europe.You will be hard put to find much about Europe at all in the policies of the three main political parties. It is an embarrassment for them. The Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats are in favour of UK membership of the EU, and speak vigorously about putting Britain at the heart of, or front and centre in, Europe. That is a laughable fiction for the Labour Party, which has continued the Tory tradition of seeking opt-outs where possible, and opposing nearly everything.

The Liberal Democrats have never had the opportunity of having their rhetoric tested in government. Interestingly, they both trumpet the success of the European Arrest Warrant, and yet are completely silent on the EU’s efforts to improve the other side of the coin – suspects and defendants’ rights, and victims’ rights, about which I have written recently.

The Conservatives, after a few token sentences in support of UK membership, spend the rest of the their policy in terror at the encroaching EU beast.

Regarding law there is, of course, a great deal about crime in the manifestos. If you click with anticipation on ‘justice’, you will find reams on crime, and nothing on any other part of the justice system, as if the civil side does not exist or has no problems worthy of consideration. There is nothing specifically about the future of the legal professions, which is not surprising. But I suspect that our future is in any case tied up with the future of the regulation of the City. For so long as the government – any government – wobbles about on whether it believes in unregulated financial markets (what to do about bankers’ bonuses, hedge funds’ betting against currencies, and so on), we will be stuck with the Clementi settlement of the market being good for us, whether there is evidence for it or not.

As if to compensate for the party manifestos’ silence on lawyers, the Financial Times ran a column this week attacking us. Should not the Law Society have a rapid response unit to counter the nonsense in articles like this? It is headed ‘Lawyers are above the law of decency’, and is written by Luke Johnson, who runs a private equity firm and is chair of the Royal Society of Arts. I was amused to see that many of the readers’ comments underneath pointed out the strange spectacle of a private equity firm manager preaching to others on standards of decency. Bizarrely, the column takes the opposite line to that of the party manifestos: they envisage a world where there is only criminal law and criminals, whereas Luke Johnson lives in a world where there is only civil law (indeed, it would appear to be mainly company law) and greedy corporate lawyers, with not a criminal lawyer or legal aid lawyer in sight.

It is difficult to know which of his statements to puzzle over first. For instance, and to take sentences more or less at random, he says two things at different points: ‘Regulation and risk aversion play into the hands of lawyers’; and ‘The west is overlawyered’. Since, in his view, we are guilty of everything possible, we are here guilty of wanting regulation and its consequences, but guilty also of wanting a free market. What about ‘institutions such as the European Commission are giant machines manufacturing lucrative work for lawyers’? Yes, and we were behind 9/11, too, and the assassination of President Kennedy. Oh, please.

His general point is that he was overcharged by his lawyer. There is a service run by the Legal Complaints Service to deal with such matters, although he doesn’t mention it. On the other hand, the EU – in response to the financial crisis – is trying to regulate the under-regulated, including equity funds, but the UK (see my points above about indecision, being at the heart of Europe etc) has opposed it strongly. Mr Johnson is on record as having opposed it, too. If I had complaints about his private equity firm, would his regulator, the Financial Services Authority, offer me as much protection as solicitors’ regulators do?

So, general election fever has hit the UK, and we are in a coma of indifference – all apart from Mr Johnson, who is frothing about lawyers and how evil we are … compared to saintly private equity firm managers, of course.

Jonathan Goldsmith is the secretary general of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe, which represents around a million European lawyers through its member bars and law societies