It is a well-known adage that only the very rich and the very poor can afford to go to law, because the poor receive Legal Aid from the public purse.  Not only does this give the poor an advantage over middle-income earners, but it is contrary to natural justice.  If there is not equal access to the legal process there is injustice.

The legal aid budget is being squandered by inefficient bureaucracy whereby legal aid lawyers turn up in court to find that there is a procedural irregularity that requires further postponement of the case – another day’s pay from the Legal Aid budget for no work at all.

As social workers gain more control of the nation’s children through Named Person’s legislation, more and more middle-income earners will discover their income being reduced as they employ lawyers to fight for their God-given rights to their own children.  They will watch in dismay as each court case is postponed to the next.  If there are penalties for late trains and late airflights, we need to introduce penalties for postponed court cases.  Law-abiding citizens should not be harassed by a social system that expects them ‘to obtain legal advice’ in order to defend themselves against the draconian powers exercised by social workers.

There needs to be equal access to the law, just as we have equal access to health care.  We need a National Justice Service like the National Health Service, to be free at the point of access to justice.

As a step in this direction, I suggest that where a person has the right to apply for legal aid, other parties to the process should have a similar right.  This will 1. begin to address the injustice, 2. help the legal aid board to assess the probability of success in granting legal aid and 3. reduce the opportunities for abuse of the system.

Appeals

As for appeals from a decision – considered a safeguard in a justice system – this may involve not only extra expense in travelling costs and time, hotel fees and the risk of paying hefty legal fees if one loses – but the tricks that lawyers employ to drag out a case (more fees for no work) will ensure the necessity of employing a lawyer who knows how to circumvent the tricks, or at least keep up with them.  So justice is not served by such an appeal system – it is itself contrary to natural justice if one must find the funds to employ a lawyer simply to keep abreast of the procedure.

Procedural irregularities are a good way to avoid addressing the issue or at least spinning it out as long as one can milk the system for what it’s worth.  This is not justice and it needs reform.  It is time to reform legal services and to develop a national natural justice system. The right of appeal is not an adequate safeguard; it requires adequate advocacy.

Update:

10 May 2017: the leaked Labour Manifesto advocates a National Education Service to provide “cradle-to-grave learning that is free at the point of use” from early years to adult education.  “The National Education Service” is the fifteenth episode of the BBC comedy series Yes, Prime Minister and was first broadcast 21 January 1988.

17 May 2017: Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party leader, is also promoting a National Investment Bank, which Natalya Naqvi on the Newstatesman website thinks could help to fix ‘our damaging financial system’, but which Oliver Riley on the Adam Smith Institute website thinks is ‘barmy’.  Interesting and helpful though the idea is, we need rather to revisit how money is created –  instead of creating money by indebtedness to private banks.

15 Jul 2017: I have heard of a case where two lawyers receiving legal aid argue the same case against another lawyer also receiving legal aid.  Is this sensible, far less just?

6 Aug 2017: “After food, shelter and health what is more important than justice? … There is no justice if it is not available to everyone”: Tory Peter Reynolds outlines the errors as he sees them in the recent and current Tory Governments.

21 Aug 2017: what would you think if your doctor would not tell you what your options are, but instead he told you to get legal advice simply to know what your options are?  You would cry out for reform, for you know that one day you will need a doctor. Many people never have to deal with the law, but when they do then they will discover that in a legal case it is ‘legal advice’ simply to be told your options!  Even asking about procedure will sometimes meet with the response to ‘get legal advice’. I would have thought that legal advice is advising which option to choose, but it is part of the cabal of the legal system that you must pay lawyers even to find out what one’s opinions are within the legal system.  Why does the system not freely tell a person their options? The answer may be the huge range of options available if you have the money, such as a private dentist can do more for your teeth than an NHS dentist, but there should be an NHS-equivalent level of legal services available to those who are dragged into the legal system by the laws of the land.

31 Aug 2017: the Resignation letter by Tory Peter Reynolds, see above: “my article ‘Has There Ever Been A Worse UK Government Than This?’ … has produced the biggest response to anything I have ever written about politics in more than 30 years of journalism.”

20 Mar 2018: the Law Society in England said that too many people were priced out of justice.  However, this is being applied to the poor whereas it applies just as much to middle-income families.  For a long time, lawyers have drawn attention to being ‘priced out of justice’ and a means-test, as still recommended by the Law Society, is not the answer.  Unequal access to justice is itself contrary to natural justice.

21 Mar 2018: BBC Breakfast news today at 41’00 carries an interview with widow Nadja Ensink about her battle for legal representation at the inquiry into her husband’s murder. The Police and the CPS will have legal representation at that inquest, but the widow of the victim has been refused legal aid. 44’00 “While there have been limitless resources to go into the inquest this summer, Nadja is left to crowdfund to pay for legal representation. This is seen as an inequality of arms by many.”

The lack of access to justice is rising up the agenda.  In 2016 the Court of Appeal ruled that the law about legal aid was legally flawed.  The Director of Rights of Women on Woman’s Hour at 5’10 minutes said that “the Legal Aid regulations were unlawful because they restricted the availability of legal aid to women affected by domestic violence which the Legal Aid Act says that they were eligible for”.

In 2015, solicitors protested changes in Legal Aid and one poster read: ‘NO Legal Aid NO Justice’.  The difficulty is that partial, discriminatory Legal Aid is still not justice.

15 Aug 2018: even the BBC does not  have enough money to challenge issues that it wants to.  It has decided not to appeal the decision in Cliff Richard’s privacy case, not because they think that the decision is correct but because it has already spent £1.9 million and it cannot be seen to spend more tax-payers’ money on a case that they have been advised that they may not win.  So on BBC Newsnight tonight David Jordan, Director BBC of Editorial Policy, said that the BBC will deal with it through the legislative process and ask the Government to consider the public interest element in the media naming a person under police investigation before they are charged. The same ‘unequal financing issue’ arises when large corporations appeal planning refusals by local authorities until they secure their desired result because the local authority cannot keep spending public money to fight the appeals.

18 Aug 2018: George Galloway’s resumé of current injustice in the UK in an address to Fathers4Justice.

8 Jan 2019: Alex Salmond admits that without crowdfunding he would have been unable to defend himself before the Court of Session.

4 Feb 2019: the cumbersome route to challenge the Parole Board decision to release people from prison has begun to be reformed. BBC Breakfast news reported that victims were previously expected to prove that the Parole Board decision was ‘illegal, irrational or procedurally flawed’, without knowing the reason in the first place! Victims have only 21 days to appeal the decision. There are attempts at redressing the inequality in the justice system that if the defender gets legal advice, so should victims. Similarly, in my experience a Scottish Sheriff can make a decision without giving reasons.

11 Mar 2019: a TED talk on Procedural Justice: “legalese is the language we use to confuse”. Reforming authoritarian structures and procedures.

11 Nov 2019: middle-class, middle-income earners are the target of The Great NHS Heist.

27 Dec 2019: Baroness Hale, retiring president of the Supreme Court, indicates that access to justice is the main need, what I have called “free at the point of access or need”, similar to the NHS described above, and that the problem was particularly evident in family courts.

21 Jan 2020: forced to get a lawyer to defend one’s rights.

15 Feb 2020: deep pockets are needed to protect one’s rights.

31 Oct 2020: justice needs Advocacy. This link explains the best Advocate to have.

1 May 2021: the USA does not guarantee human rights. It is time for a review of law and justice. Of course, it is central to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but that is another matter.

26 May 2021: the trial has collapsed of two retired police officers and an ex-solicitor for amending police statements after the Hillsborough disaster. The reasons, as reported in the BBC breaking news item, are based on legal details. I guessed this and it is yet another example where victims will feel Justice has failed. People are getting fed up with legal arguments and loopholes. I repeat: it is time for a review of law and justice and we will need lawyers to lead the way, as illustrated by The Secret Barrister. At 3 p.m. the BBC news reported it as the accused being “acquitted” with a “not guilty” verdict as they had “no case to answer”. Altering the documents “did not amount to a crime” and the prosecution service is now under criticism. The same day, Dominic Cummings took aim at the whole political setup in the UK which gave voters a choice between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn at the last election and that decision-making in Government has inherent “destructive incentives” failing to reward competence. By way of illustration, he described the early approach to the coronavirus pandemic: “It was a classic example of Groupthink in action”. Under the general theme of governance, he illustrated the inadequacy of national planning with reference to national preparation for solar flares and anthrax terrorism. Whitehall was a disaster.

30 Dec 2022 middle-income earners are being hit as usual.

12 Jan 2023: Jordan Peterson explains the stress from the weaponising of quasi-legal professional bodies and that accused persons are advised to get legal counsel, usually at great expense, waste of time, stress on the accused, their families and their professional life. You can no longer trust professionals because they are mandated by their professional bodies. Trust built up over 175 years has been destroyed in the past seven years. The state of regulatory bodies in Canada. His tweet to the Ontario College of Psychologists about psychology being censored.

16 Mar 2023 the Spectator: both working class and upper class look down upon the aspirational middle class.

13 Jul 2023: SNP hitting the middle class in Scotland through Council Tax differentials.

6 Oct 2023: the BBC documentary The Cost of Innocence: “Every year thousands of people are acquitted in court by a jury for crimes they didn’t commit.” A sexual accuser has lifelong anonymity but retired High Court Judge, Justice Sir Richard Henriques says: “if a deliberate, false allegation is made, it is worse than burglary; it is a very, very bad assault upon a fellow human being and should be visited with a criminal sanction.” Further, the accused is simply declared “not guilty” rather than “innocent”, their domestic life, employment and health are all affected and they have to pay for their own defence to prove they are innocent. This even has the term “The Innocence Tax” applied to it. Henriques says about this unequal contest: “There is a real danger of a miscarriage of justice”. Slowly, some lawyers are calling out the weaknesses in their own professional procedures. Boyd’s Conjecture. Too many professionals fail to realise that just as the Nuremberg Principles called out high-ranking Nazis, so surely their complicity with injustice will be called out in eternity and they will have to live with the exposure of their complicity throughout the endless ages of eternity. They need the forgiveness and acquittal that only Jesus Christ can secure 1Jn 2:1-2. One day unjust procedures will be corrected in this earthly sphere, but no thanks to generations of complicit lawyers and politicians. Well done, Sir Richard Henriques; may your ball keep rolling.