Justice Secretary wants one law for the rich and another for the poor

As part of his controversial reforms to Criminal Legal Aid, Chris Grayling, the Justice Secretary, wants to deny the right to choose their own lawyer to anyone arrested who is poor and, therefore, needs to rely on legal aid. This strikes at the heart of a suspect’s right to proper representation. It also runs counter to the usual Tory mantra that choice in public services is essential. A powerful incentive to providing a good service is removed, if a client is allocated to a lawyer and then cannot leave them.

When asked about this by the Law Gazette last week, Grayling said:- “I don’t believe that most people who find themselves in our criminal justice system are great connoisseurs of legal skills. We know the people in our prisons and who come into our courts often come from the most difficult and challenged backgrounds.”

Such a comment would be crass coming from any politician. Grayling, however, is the Justice Secretary. He ought, therefore, to be concerned about justice for all and not least for those “from the most difficult and challenged backgrounds”. His assertion that such people should be denied the right to choose who represents them because they are not capable of making the choice is breath-taking in its assumptions and factually wrong. 

Who are the people that Grayling wants to deny choice to? Based on my own experience as a criminal solicitor some years ago, a significant number of them are likely to be innocent. Most of those who get involved in the criminal justice system are “mad”, “sad” or “bad” – and those who might be considered “bad” are by far the smallest of these three categories.

And who will these lawyers be, on whom clients will have to rely to establish their innocence or to plead in mitigation? You will have seen the lorries belonging to the Eddie Stobart haulage company. Incredibly, Eddie Stobart is a leading contender in bidding for the new criminal legal aid contracts. There are to be 400 new “mega-firms”. Contracts are likely to go to the lowest bidders. Serco, G4S, Capita and Tesco are all rumoured to be planning to bid.

Grayling claims that the choice of lawyer does not matter. This is plainly nonsense and particularly so in our adversarial system of justice. I have no doubt that Grayling would not take this attitude for himself or someone close to him. It has been notable how the recent rich defendants before the courts, Chris Huhne, Vicky Pryce, Stuart Hall, Rebekah Brooks etc have all chosen to employ top QCs.

Equality before the law is as essential a pillar of democracy as the right to vote every five years. In many ways there is already one legal system for the rich and another for the poor in the UK but Grayling’s reforms will seriously exacerbate the divide.

We are becoming a less decent and civilised country. One more like the USA with its notoriously two-tiered  justice. One that does not much care about miscarriages of justice if they happen to those from the “most difficult and challenged backgrounds”.  

Grayling is trying to bring in his reforms without any parliamentary debate. If you think that, at the least, MPs should debate them, then please consider signing the online petition to “save UK Justice" at http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/48628

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The UK's educational apartheid explains the "Michael Gove mystery"

The “Michael Gove mystery” is how the same politician can be so loathed and so admired at the same time. The answer to the mystery lies in the educational apartheid between the private and state sectors, which has far greater importance in the UK than in any other country in Europe.

In the UK, 7% of children attend private schools and 93% attend state schools. However the products of private schools go on to dominate those parts of society that have power and influence over the rest.

Gove is widely loathed by those who work in state schools and by those whose children and grandchildren go to those schools. Yesterday, normally moderate head teachers passed a motion of no confidence and heckled him.

The state education system Gove took over in 2010 was not perfect but it was certainly not broken as it had been in 1997 after the last Tory government.  Gove has pushed through a raft of harmful policies, which I have mostly written about before. He has pushed much of the state system into near-crisis.

Gove has denigrated, bullied and blustered. He has relied on a tiny coterie of advisers and tends not to engage in rational argument with those who oppose him but rather to subject them to ad hominem attacks by calling them “Trotskyites” or “the enemies of promise” or the like, in a chilling echo of the tactics of Senator Joe McCarthy.

But yet, Gove is admired and regarded as a leading contender for the leadership of a post-Cameron Tory party. He is viewed as one of the few political stars in the Cabinet.

Gove’s perceived success reveals much about power in the UK. The elite – that is to say the “people who matter” - do not use the state education system and often do not know well anyone who does. They are full of admiration for Gove.

It is a deeply held belief for many who use the private education system that the state system is self-evidently inferior (they do not consider that the private system’s “success” might be primarily due to the fact that the playing field is not level but has been sharply tipped in its favour). 90% of the press is right wing and carries frequent articles running down the state system written by journalists who don’t use it, for editors who don’t use it, employed by proprietors who don’t use it. The BBC and the Guardian do not provide much balance. Their editors and commentators tend to be members of the 7% private school elite too.

Our educational apartheid causes immeasurable harm to our country. Our elite are profoundly ignorant of the system that educates 93% of the population. One consequence of that is they have no idea how disastrous a minister Michael Gove is. They may just make him leader.

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Hostility to the EU may be deep but it is not wide - Ed Miliband please note

Just because some people feel very strongly indeed about the UK’s membership of the EU does not mean that they should be allowed to place this issue at the centre of the political agenda. Despite the efforts of Nigel Farage, assorted Tories and, crucially, the billionaires who control most of our press, the vast majority of the British people have other priorities.

In January 2013 a joint Economist/Ipsos Mori poll set out the top ten issues that voters thought were facing Britain. The EU did not feature at all. In February, Harris carried out a similar poll of the top 15 issues. The EU was ranked 14th out of 15 priorities.

Once asked specifically about the EU issue, it is true that the public are in favour of a referendum. However, if asked specifically in an opinion poll, people would no doubt say that they were in favour of referenda on a host of issues e.g. the NHS, education or tax. People naturally like the theoretical idea of having their views counted on issues. (Personally, I would like a referendum on a binding commitment to abolish child poverty and also one every twenty years on the abolition of the monarchy – everyone may have their own wish-list)

The rise of UKIP is taken as evidence that the UK’s membership of the EU is a major issue in the electorate but this is not borne out by detailed polling. In December 2012, Lord Ashcroft published the results of the most comprehensive ever poll into the attitudes of UKIP voters and “considerers”. He reported that only just over a quarter of UKIP supporters put the EU in their top three most important issues facing the UK; only 7% put the EU as their top issue.  Ashcroft concluded that it wasn’t the EU issue that attracted people to UKIP but their “outlook”. UKIP attracts people who think the country is going to the dogs, loathe political correctness and want to take Britain back to a time when things were “done more sensibly”. 

If David Cameron had studied Lord Ashcroft’s research he would know that he is as likely to alienate UKIP supporters by his gay marriage proposals as anything he does on the EU.

As for Ed Miliband, he must resist the siren voices and the bullying press telling him he must offer an in/out referendum after the 2015 election. The UK’s membership of the EU is not a priority issue for the British electorate.  They are far more concerned with growth, jobs, education, skills, housing, the NHS and other issues. 

If Miliband were to offer a referendum it would probably blight his premiership. In opposition the Tories would be unrestrained in their Europhobia and, backed by Murdoch and the rest, they would probably win a referendum. That would destroy Miliband’s government and worse, in the words of Vince Cable, the UK once out of the EU would “end up like Ukraine”.

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