The English Bar is a profession with great skill in keeping itself exclusive, purportedly to ensure the highest professional standards. This means that it is nowadays difficult to get a pupillage to complete the formal training to become a practising barrister. Neither is the Bar generous with pupillage reductions or exemptions. Even over a decade of work as a lawyer other than a barrister is according to the Bar not worth the few months spent as a pupil barrister.
However, if the prospective pupil barrister’s parent happens to be a solicitor giving work to the barristers’ chambers where the solicitor’s little bastard child will undertake his or her pupillage, the chances of getting the pupillage can miraculously increase significantly, not to mention the shame of the profiteering opportunist who cannot even speak English properly (being able to speak grammatically correct English in court is clearly not required for modern or contemporary barristers), dropping at last minute clients for those who pay more, elbowing his way up to the bench and silk, thinking of himself as king even if the only kingly thing about him is the literal meaning of his foreign name, the upstart of the Bar, continuing a family tradition of dishonest legal soliciting solely for their own benefit, collecting gifts for themselves, more skilled in nothing more than billing the maximum fees for themselves, from father's legal practice closed by regulator to son taking silk is the proud history of the family.
Another route to the Bar is being an attractive young lady although that can compromise the beneficiary to a varying standard just like in any common profession. Offering one's body works at the Bar like in any profession, "meritocracy" or otherwise.
This directly disproves that keeping the bar so high maintains high quality in the profession. A contrario sensu, a less high bar would let in more talent if anything as nepotists and the like tend to always get in through lip service...
So there lies some of the Bar’s sense of justice and standards of professional integrity and excellence. In fairness to the Bar, it is not of course by any means the only profession where selection is often more by who you know than what you know.
Barristers were maybe best ranked in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensitivity (1811) where Edward Ferrars described his mother’s ambitions for him, ‘[e]ven a barrister would do, if I drove a barouche.’
Still the Bar is little worse or better than any other profession. While the Bar has never had exactly a shortage of pompous assess, with a dead high horse's arse on their head, a wig made of a horse's tail hair, after having a horse shoe cut and other clipping into shape of their own hair (if any), even 'the law is a ass', like one barrister called Dickens said, there are of course also some very fine barristers fighting before the benches for justice which often would not be achieved without them.
If you cannot join them, beat them.
