Poor Law

The Minister for Justice, Heterosexual Hostelry and Profitable Incarceration, Chris Graybeing, has been lecturing the legal profession over its quaint and fusty penchant for defending non-paying customers. Graybeing, who has almost as many legal qualifications as the Minister for Health and News Corporation has medical, wants to reduce by seventeen and a half per cent the fees paid for representing those who cannot afford to pay their own lawyers; this will automatically kill off law firms which make most of their money defending poor people. What can possibly be wrong with that? Some of the firms will merge; others will doubtless be taken over by the likes of Serco, G4S and other specialists in crime: a process Graybeing calls "consolidation". When the likes of Serco and G4S take over the police as well, this will merely consolidate matters yet further, and the lucky offender (suspect, in Oldspeak) will get a much smoother ride, all the way from targeted arrest to tabloid-sanctioned punishment. Graybeing also proclaimed that plans "to impose a one-year residence test for legal aid would also be re-examined in relation to the way in which they would affect children under 12 months old". Banging up foreign babies along with their mothers, it appears, will have to wait until the 2015 manifesto.