2011 June 28 » 21stCenturyFix.org.uk

I was invited to a briefing at the Law Society yesterday morning on the back of a post I wrote last week about the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill currently being frogmarched through Parliament. As the briefing did, so I too am going to focus on the Legal Aid side of things – a subject I find myself new to; though in the light of everything I learnt yesterday, I have to say I am woefully sorry that I have arrived at this party at such a late hour.

I suppose and guess many of you out there are also unclear of the implications of cuts in Legal Aid – or, indeed, what position Legal Aid has occupied in British society since its constitution.

And I also suppose when we think of Legal Aid, we think of poor people without resources who cannot afford to defend themselves – for there are plenty of these sorts of people about; and there will be more so as the economic climate worsens. But Legal Aid, as it currently stands, serves a much wider remit than the simple defence of the marginalised in need. The vast majority of cases in the Crown Court require the support of Legal Aid services. Even in the Magistrates Court, up to fifty percent of all cases require such support. Without Legal Aid, without face-to-face consultations, without a decent and workable definition of domestic violence, hundreds of thousands of working people will be disenfranchised from their rights – just as the economy takes a turn for the worse.

And out of those hundreds of thousands, we might find ourselves one day suddenly without the right to financial support when we are at our most vulnerable. Maybe a case of medical negligence. Maybe a wife-beater – where the wife has complained to the police but not proceeded with a court case against her husband. Maybe a young person in digs in need of legal advice against a landlord from hell – unhappy to use mandatory phoneline assessment gateways where once a supportive face could have winkled out the bundle of other potential problems associated with the trigger which drove them to ask for help.

In a society which after the war was constituted to care for all its citizens, the principles of Legal Aid formed one of the pillars of our much treasured Welfare State – a state which in a number of other areas such as education, health and social care now finds itself under what appears to be totally irrational and incoherent attack from our government.

Sadly, I’ve come to the conclusion that the attacks are anything but incoherent – and, like Harry Potter’s invisibility magic, this awful awful Coalition is using the cloak of apparent incompetence to push ahead an entirely politically-driven agenda.

Where prevention was once seen to be better than cure, where intervention was once seen to be more cost-effective than litigation, the short-sighted proposals from a government bent on short-term slash and run seem clearly to have only one destination: that of undermining and unpicking the fabric of a supportive society where those in need could once have reasonably expected to find the support they needed.

Before I continue, let’s see an excerpt from a contextualising foreword by Linda Lee, President of the Law Society, to the briefing document I was given (intro here and full version in .pdf here) – and which was produced by the Sound Off For Justice initiative as a response by the legal profession to the government’s proposals. In what I can only reasonably describe as barely-contained fury, the Law Society’s official position is couched thus:

The Prime Minister and the Government want to reduce crime and the deficit. If they force the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill through parliament in its current form, they risk the opposite. The Bill focuses on only short-term budget-gain and not the long-term consequences.

The Justice Bill is littered with mistakes, inaccuracies and lacks detailed impact assessments. The figures and calculations the government have used for the Justice Bill are based on assumptions rather than evidence. This Bill leaves our civil justice system at the edge of an abyss beyond which we do not know where we are destined.

All the signs suggest that the Bill is to be forced through parliament in haste. The government is not listening.

I firmly believe that as it stands the Bill will only achieve the following:

Cuts in civil legal will increase criminality and damage social cohesion;

Cuts in civil legal aid will penalise the victims of crime and not the

perpetrators;

Clause 12 will undermine a cornerstone of our justice system;

The Jackson reforms will increase costs to businesses, to government departments and the taxpayer as well as raid the damages of victims of serious injury by up to 25%.

We oppose plans in clause 52 to cap the compensation people receive when they have been wrongfully prosecuted by the state.

What’s even more unpalatable, however, is the following series of realities. To the Law Society’s counter-proposals which run as follows …

The Government wants to cut the legal aid budget by £350 million. We recognise the argument for budget savings. We offer plans that could cut the legal aid budget by £360 million. We have a fully costed proposal, which will reduce the legal aid budget.

Our alternative plan will protect the victims and the most vulnerable. We know how to drive efficiencies through the legal aid system and we have called for a cap on all fees from the legal aid budget. To date we have been ignored or misunderstood by the Government.

… the government has then apparently produced a “feeble document” in reply – a document which contains little new data, and aims to rebut the Society’s arguments through a surfeit of rhetorical posturing.

For those of us already aware of government behaviours in other areas of society – from trades union legislation to NHS reorganisation, from education and tuition fee policies to social care cuts – none of this actually comes as a surprise. And yet I wonder if the government, in its outright rejection of fully-costed proposals by people who surely know the system inside out (proposals which would both cost less than the government’s own planned programme of cuts without, at the same time, hurting the most vulnerable in society), has not only bitten off more than it can chew but also runs the risk of choking on its own verbal incoherence.

Just to be clear here. Experts in a field, in this case the law, have proposed cuts which go far beyond what the government hopes to achieve – and have, at the same time, apparently squared the circle of client provision by guaranteeing that the most vulnerable will not be seriously affected. And yet the government, with the bluster of rhetorical device, apparently rejects this counter-package out of hand. The thread seems pretty common. The thesis hardly new. This is an ideologically-driven government bent on reshaping and re-engineering British society for the benefit of a chosen few and to the detriment of a needy many. They don’t actually intend to avoid the needy losing out on their rights – for legal rights, in this brave new world, will belong only to the most important amongst us. Those who make and shake and wish to own even more of the aforementioned real estate will – under these government proposals – get to do so.

And in the meantime, the strategy of this Coalition government becomes absolutely clear: the total and utter dismantling of British society as we know it.

The complete destruction of all of the pillars that once constituted our Welfare State.

So did you vote for that when you voted for them last year? Did you know that when your daughter suffered awful medical consequences at the hands of an incompetent surgeon you’d be making it more difficult to achieve the justice you deserved? Did you know that when you didn’t take your husband to court for those bruises you wouldn’t be able to get the kind of support you needed when the abuse became far more unpleasant and life-threatening?

Did you in fact understand that just as other elements of the Welfare State served to keep the wolf from the door for millions of people in our society – and thus achieve a cohesion which made Britain a place of imperfect tolerance but tolerance nevertheless – so the Legal Aid system as it currently stands has made the British legal landscape a better and more proactive place than anything which might have existed in its absence?

And when you voted for this band of rhetorical millionaires, did you actually appreciate they would take massive gambles with your future wellbeing based on hollow rebuttal and not evidence – that is to say, based on political hunches and not data?

So where’s the justice in that?

Please tell me, you (deathly) hallowed politicians who currently run this farce of a country: wherever in the world was the rhetoric of fiction so much more important than the reality of fact?

If not in 21st century Coalition Britain …
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Update to this post: the BBC are now reporting this story thus.

Back from London, I have quite a lot to report. One of the posts is going to have to wait till tomorrow but the other can appear today.

Yesterday’s event was organised by Intelligence Squared on behalf of Oxford Analytica (company website here) on the subject of “Ten Years After 9/11: The World Remade”.

Guest speakers included David Miliband “in full intellectual flow”; an ex-diplomat – amongst other things – called Michael Crawford (when I first received the email inviting me to the event, I have to say this name made me look up its organisers and participants), who proceeded to give a highly measured and intelligible analysis of the world since 9/11; an amusing self-styled “coffee-drinking bureaucrat” from the CIA and other acronymic organisations called Philip Mudd, who proceeded to terrify the life out of the girl sitting next to me by calling out her name and listing her publicly available personal details (age, birthplace, family details, inside leg measurement …) – whilst also saying the kind of things that would clearly limit his opportunities for future employment; a delightful China specialist called Rana Mitter, who brought the house down with epigrammatic summaries of where China currently finds itself (“open and illiberal”, if I understood correctly, was one I liked in particular); and finally a Russia specialist who was born in Texas and yet had a refreshingly upbeat take on where Russia is at today – especially when we consider what it was like a decade ago before the Russian people had really done anything to fully exploit their economic potential.

About the format of the event? What I most liked about it was the fact that each speaker used a distinctive style from the previous and managed to follow on from acts which were all hard to follow in their different ways. It was like being back at university – in the best sense of the word, that is. Although most seem to have some kind of retainer-relationship with Oxford Analytica, there wasn’t a corporate approach to talking about the world and how it has developed in the last ten years – quite the opposite, in fact: if one cared to read between the lines, there existed gently-expressed but nevertheless firm disagreement between the different worldviews each speaker chose to expound. Philip Mudd’s description of the existential nature of the “threat” meetings the security organisations held on a daily basis, both immediately after 9/11 as well as in the succeeding years, was one example where different truly-felt experiences collided in a most genteel but nevertheless distinctive way. Whilst Sarah Michael’s appeal to the audience to see Russia outwith its traditional stereotypes was most attractive – and surely deserves further attention.

Meanwhile, Nader Mousavizadeh’s chairing of the debate was succinct and respectful – although the timeframe allotted and the number of speakers included meant questions, especially during the first section, were kept to a minimum.

I’d originally been offered the opportunity to interview one of the speakers and had put my name down for the CIA guy – mainly because of the article in the New York Times I’d read and posted about here. This described how the US government was developing neatly packaged tools to allow those peoples who suffer repression from regimes – that is to say, regimes which close down online communication or use it to identify the opposition – to safely set up their own mobile networks and portable Internet infrastructures. But when I flagged up the issue to the organisers of the event as something I was interested in finding out more on, I was rather brusquely told all opportunities for interviews had already been taken up.

I can’t say I saw many people doing much interviewing after the event either – perhaps this was simply a miscoordinated mailshot which should have been tailored more effectively.

I’d like to finish this piece by dealing with some of what was actually said. David Miliband headlined the proceedings by describing the last ten years as a decade of disorder. When he finished speaking, and he did so quite brilliantly (never having seen anyone who can list five points without a PowerPoint presentation – and not forget the fourth), he was quite sharply brought to book for describing the decade as one of disorder: for some in the world, it involved a substantial improvement and cementing of their societies (both Russia and China being significant examples of this, as the later speakers would serve to sketch out). If one were caring to take a moderately colonialist and Western-centric view of world history, this would fairly be described as a decade of disorder.

But not everyone went to war in Iraq and not everyone suffered the consequences of rising oil prices.

Miliband did make some very ingenious points though, even as by so doing he revealed his own place in the grand scheme of things: he compared the disorder sparked off by what Philip Mudd described as the revolutionaries of Al-Qaeda (revolutionaries, note – not terrorists) with Microsoft’s Encarta encyclopaedia losing out to Wikipedia’s volunteers. It does of course beg the question, and this is most definitely an elephant in the room not made explicit at this event: does the order that a monopolistic company like Microsoft bring to society, with all its documented sharp business practices, really mean so much to top-flight politicians like Mr Miliband? Even Philip Mudd quite refreshingly pointed out, whilst I think letting it be understood that he didn’t believe in the sustainability of the current Arab Spring movements, that a true belief in democracy means just that: giving people the opportunity to have a voice with all its consequences. Surely the lesson of Encarta versus Wikipedia is quite different from the conclusion Mr Miliband drew: despite its “detours” and distractions, an order of a very different kind is beginning to flesh itself out.

And this, in particular, caught my eye. I think both Miliband and Crawford referenced the phrase “politics of empowerment” – and, again, I think it was Crawford who talked about “ungoverned spaces” versus “misgoverned spaces”. I really did want to ask the following question – even as I really didn’t dare to let it see the light of day that evening. Even as Mousavizadeh said several times: “Does anyone have a burning question they’d like to ask the speaker?”

But these kind of events don’t really allow for clarification. And above all, I am a clarifier – not a grandstander.

So the question went unasked. But here it is – for you to cogitate and take away with you if you care: if we believe in democracy, if we believe in the politics of empowerment, if we believe in letting people truly decide, what, then, exactly has the last ten years since 9/11 shown us in relation to the development of the Internet – in relation to how people organise, communicate and come together in the second decade of the 21st century?

Is this cyberspace – which has grown in parallel to the trauma of the Al-Qaeda revolution – an “ungoverned space”, a “misgoverned space” or a “differently governed space”?

And, depending on your conclusion, what can – or what should – traditional politicians and politics really learn from all of this?