Criminal Lawyers

Striking criminal law barristers have been demonstrating their commitment to an outmoded, dinosaurian concept of British justice: "We do this work because we are socially minded," self-incriminated one of them. As has been clear since the original assaults on legal aid by the Conservatives and their little yellow fags in the first Bullingdon Club administration, Her Majesty's Government envisages a smooth-running system whereby those who incur disapproval are arrested by a privatised police force and, should they survive the experience, are subsequently hustled through an efficient corporate trial, and thence into profitable incarceration by an enterprising human warehouse company. Such a system would run all the smoother, of course, if the police, the courts and the prisons were all managed by the same corporation; perhaps those efficient Serco people. By contrast, the enemy within is blatantly nostalgic for a return to the nineteen-seventies, whereby legal representation is available not only to hard-working families like the Maxwells and the Windors, but even to those guilty of that primal malfeasance which contains all genuine offences within itself: the crime of fiscal undeservingness.