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Socialist Lawyer issue 47

What unites the Haldane Society with the Law Society, Bar Council, Civil Justice Council, the Master of the Rolls, the President of the Family Division and other Lords Justices? Along with thousands of legal aid practitioners, and their umbrella groups, we’re all opposed to the government’s and Legal Services Commission’s proposals for fixed fees, and competitive tendering. Far from being “a fairer deal for legal aid”, the very real possibility is that implementation of these proposals could kill the legal aid system stone-dead. The House of Commons Constitutional Affairs Committee (CAC) commented that the reaction of the proposals from the legal profession and other commentators was “overwhelmingly hostile”, it had received the largest number of submissions of any of its inquiries so far, and “almost all legal aid practitioners informed us that they were contemplating leaving the legal aid market or that they had already done so”.

The crisis is severe for individual practitioners. Nobody can accuse legal aid lawyers of being “fat cats”. The immigration, housing, family, and criminal practitioners featured on these pages work long hours, in private practice or not-for-profit agencies, to keep a roof over their clients’ home, keep them safe from persecution, force the state to provide subsistence, keep their families together, and keep them out of jail. They do that because they are committed to the clients, not for personal riches. As the squeeze gets worse, all of us in the legal aid world are looking over our shoulders at how we will personally survive.

But the real crisis is whether the clients will survive. As advice deserts spread, as even the new CLACs and CLANs are under-funded, as private practitioners abandon legal aid for work that allows them to pay their own housing costs, who is going to fight for Ms N, fleeing domestic violence, living in a foreign country, having a nervous breakdown and disbelieved by the Home Office? Who will be on hand to prevent police officers from reverting to the bad old days of fabricating evidence, before legal advice at police stations became free and accessible? Who will provide the drop-in services and telephone advice lines run by Law Centres to those who (just) fail to qualify for legal aid? Who is going to spend the time with a mentally ill client, building up trust so that she can make an informed decision? Who is going to sort out the nightmarish tangle of housing benefit decisions?

Carol Storer, Piers Mostyn, Sonia Routledge, Damian Hanley, Kathy Meade, Clara Connolly, Penny Mackinder, and Angus King all paint a grim, but accurate, future of the devastation of publicly-funded legal services under Carter.

As Jamie Ritchie points out, there never was a golden era of legal aid. When it was first introduced, in the 1940s, it was simply a way of ensuring that people with very low incomes didn’t go unrepresented in criminal, matrimonial or personal injury proceedings. In the 1970s, radical lawyers (usually Haldane Society members) found new ways of using legal aid: expanding its scope to housing, domestic violence, welfare benefits, immigration law and developing those areas of the law at the same time; delivering legal services through law centres and other not-for-profit organisations; seeing litigation as a tool alongside industrial action and other forms of protest or campaigning; developing specialist legal aid firms; diversifying the legal profession.

This government intends to turn the clock back. The CAC warns “the most vulnerable clients – those most in need of legal aid assistance – are likely to suffer”. The response from the Law Society, whilst officially on the side of its legal aid practitioners, has been disappointing. That of the Bar Council is even worse. We need the whole of the legal profession, not just the legal aid practitioners, to resist these proposals, not out of self-interest, but in the interests of present and future clients.

Meanwhile, we’re pleased to report some legal victories. Daniel Machover and Kate Maynard write on the use of international law to issue arrest warrants against war criminals in the Israeli government. Azam Zia reports on Turkish lawyer Behic Asci’s successful hunger strike, forcing the Turkish government to relax some its isolation measures in Turkey F-type prisons. Chris Williams and Mike Mansfield QC represented the Hurndall family at the inquest of their son, Tom, murdered by Israeli soldiers. Tony Blair and Peter Goldsmith may have let British Aerospace off the hook by stopping the Serious Fraud Office inquiry into the payment of bribes, but they can’t stop the voluntary sector litigating to get BAE in the dock. Few of the domestic victories would have been possible without legal aid, and none of them would have been possible without the expertise of legal aid lawyers.

The Society concluded our series of human rights lectures for this year with an inspirational talk by Moazzam Begg on his three-year incarceration in Guantanamo Bay and Bagram. Sadat Sayeed led us through the tortuous path of litigation trying to force the US government to accept due process. The story is one of brave lawyers, but a reluctant Supreme Court and an aggressive government that legislates to legalise whatever the Supreme Court has declared unlawful. Sarah Burton from Amnesty International spoke on the campaign to Close Down Guantanamo Bay – and the Haldane Society is proud to support it. Having heard Moazzam speak, we are even more determined that all of the inmates should be released.

Thanks go to Rebekah Wilson for editing Socialist Lawyer so ably for the last two years, and now participating in the Haldane Society from Nepal. Hannah Rought-Brooks has stepped into her shoes, supported by a collective, and so Socialist Lawyer goes from strength to strength.

Liz Davies, Chair of the Haldane Society

Read more about our Guantanamo campaign.