The Government’s Legal Aid Cuts Are Leaving Vulnerable People With Nowhere to Turn

If you want to see some examples of serious miscarriages of justice, and wrongful imprisonment, look at the ‘In the Back’ column of Private Eye, and its predecessor started by Paul Foot, ‘Footnotes’. This will convince you of the necessity of maintaining legal aid to help defend the innocent. And specialist legal advice is also desperately needed by the tens or hundreds of thousands of council tenants and the unemployed suffering from the Bedroom Tax and benefit sanctions.

Politics and Insights

“Ministers keep using the mantra that their proposals are to protect the most vulnerable when, quite obviously, they are the exact opposite. If implemented their measures would, far from protecting the most vulnerable, directly harm them. Whatever they do in the end, Her Majesty’s Government should stop this 1984 Orwellian-type misuse of language.”  – Lord Bach, discussing the Legal Aid Bill.

Source: Hansard, Column 1557, 19 May, 2011.

 Posted by Sadiq Khan, Shadow Lord Chancellor, Shadow Justice Secretary and Member of Parliament for Tooting, on 19 May 2014 In Huff Post Politics blog.

Solicitors, barristers, judges, legal advisors, campaigners and others will today take part in the London Legal Walk. Thousands of people will snake their way from the Royal Courts of Justice to Hyde Park and back to raise money in support of free legal advice charities in London and the South East. Last year, 7,500 walkers raised a…

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