Another Letter To The Lord Chancellor

Over the last year or so I have written either directly or indirectly to the Lord Chancellor quite a number of times on the subject of changes to our Legal Aid system.  In every case I have received a reply containing the normal selection of platitudes, rhetoric and misinformation.  The latest such response can be found here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/86yz9vjpvl3rin6/Grayling%20Response.pdf 

Given all that has happened and continues to happen the contents of his reply have particularly enraged me so I thought I would share my responding letter with you.

Dear Mr Grayling

LEGAL AID REFORM

I am responding to your letter of the 29^th May 2014 to John Hayes MP which was in itself a response to a letter I had written to him on this subject.  Your letter was quite long and includes a number of matters with which I have to take issue and I shall deal with them in order that they arise in your letter.

1.    It was entirely unnecessary to explain to me that, “The justice system in England and Wales has a world class reputation for impartiality and fairness and is a model for many other systems the world over.”  Especially in view of the fact it was me that has reminded you and Mr Hayes of that fact in several of my earlier correspondences, I find it more than a little patronising.  I think you will find that the damage that your policies have done is more than likely to discredit our criminal justice system in the eyes of the world.

It is particularly infuriating to see you state that “publicly funded legal services must be provided in as efficient a way as possible” when it obvious to all but those that do not want to see that the whole way that services are provided have been and continue to be neither efficient nor effective; and very little of that is to do with the lawyers themselves who you seem to want to punish for it.  The (LAA) Legal Aid Authority and (CPS) Crown Prosecution services are without doubt amongst the most incompetent of all government services and none of your ‘transformations’ have even started to address that.  In fact tales that I regularly hear tell of LAA behaviour that would not be at all out of place in an episode of ‘Rogue Traders’; and the regularity of CPS failure to disclose documents to the defence seem like deliberate attempts to pervert the course of justice.

Furthermore to claim that any of the actions that you have taken will make the system in any way ‘fairer’ is without doubt an outrageous falsehood when it is quite obvious the reverse is true.

2.    Once again you reiterate the roundly discredited soundbite about Legal Aid costing £2bn per year with around £1bn on criminal legal aid.  This figure has been falling steadily over the last decade or so and continues to do so.  Constant repetition of an inaccurate statement will never make it true.

3.    You talk about maintaining the credibility of legal aid.  I fail to see how you can possibly achieve this by making it inaccessible to those who most need it; and protesting as much as you like about it still being available to those who have little or no resources would also be disingenuous as the reality regularly proves that not to be the case.  In your letter you say, “Access to justice and access to taxpayer-funded legal aid must not be confused”; which of course would be true if you were only referring to wealthy people accused of crime, however that is not the case in point here.  Already people accused of crimes who are unable to fund representation are regularly coming before courts as litigants in person, their ineptitude is understandably causing massive wastes of court time and God knows how many miscarriages of justice.  In previous times many of these accused would on the advice of their lawyer have plead guilty at the first opportunity thereby saving hours of court and prosecutors’ time.

It is a well-known fact that a very large proportion of people charged with a crime either never reach trial or are found not guilty at trial and your changes to legal aid mean that someone on even a modest income may have to use their life-savings or even sell their homes in order to fund a defence against a publicly-funded prosecution for an offence they may not have committed.

4.    Your letter refers to the government’s undertaking in 2010 to carry out a fundamental review of the legal aid scheme to make it work more efficiently.  It appears though, that what was really intended to just unilaterally cut costs across the board without regard to the consequences.  The evidence suggests that you have paid little or any attention at all to the warnings or opinions of the professional bodies and other than a few cosmetic changes following tens of thousands of responses to your ‘consultations’ you have just ploughed ahead regardless totally ignoring very workable suggestions that could save the amount of money you say need to..  The consequences of the various legislative and regulatory changes to the legal aid system amount to little less than a catastrophic erosion in both criminal and civil justice systems.

5.    The embarkation on your next step of ‘reform’ outlined in the document Transforming Legal Aid’ delivering a more credible and efficient system, which can hardly have been more inappropriately named, has continued to wreak havoc upon our once great (CJS) criminal justice system.  Although one could hardly argue with its claim to have transformed legal aid, however the resulting chimera that has emerged is a hideous representation that in name only is similar to what has gone before.  Once again you insult my intelligence by providing a link to it, as if by following it. it was going expose some sort of Rosetta Stone providing the legend to explain some kind of sense in your methods.  Did you really imagine that I would not have already have read the ridiculous document? 

6.    You conclude by saying that ‘we cannot ignore the financial situation we face’; and yet in all your actions you appear to be doing exactly that.  The courts, prisons and probation services are in chaos, the court interpreter system is in meltdown the prison transport and tagging arrangements have been brought into disrepute; and this is all as a direct result of your policies.  Your relentless privatisation strategy which you have explained as being ‘ideological’ have not saved any money and in actual fact have cost a great deal more which you will no doubt deny by not revealing additional costs appearing in different budgets.  Your actions have resulted in such pandemonium in the courts that you have been forced into a massive expansion of the (PDS) Public Defender Service, paying publicly employed barristers almost double what you would have to pay them in private practice to do the same thing.  It seems to me to be an extraordinary state of affairs when we hear of a Conservative led government conducting the nationalisation of a private service.  You have appointed whole lists of outsourcing companies to provide services formerly in public control and the catalogue of ineptitude, fraud and mismanagement that resulted is there for all to see.  Not least the court interpreter services costing double what they had under previous arrangements.  One can only guess at what the motives are behind this ‘ideological’ shift.  I can only think of two and neither are very flattering.

Destroying the criminal bar and bankrupting thousands of solicitors in order to clear the way for outsourcing companies without experience or knowledge in the practice of criminal advocacy will not provide ‘a more credible and efficient system’ but will no doubt have precisely the opposite effect.

All of these matters are extremely serious but none as serious as for the victims of crimes where the perpetrators have gone unpunished; nor for the wrongly convicted who may have lost their homes, livelihoods or even liberty as a result of your government’s woeful mismanagement of the justice system. 

Numerous experts who have lived and worked in the CJS all their lives from all sections of the profession, the bar, solicitors, CILEX, ACPI, NAPO, the judiciary and even lawyers within the Treasury Department have all condemned the changes.  Knowledgeable commentators from the quality press have seen through the rhetoric and misinformation that issues forth from your little citadel in Petty France.  The continued denial of these consequences by you and others at the MoJ by maintaining the charade that all is okay insults the nation in every possible way. 

Over the last couple of years, at every given opportunity you and your underlings at the Ministry of Justice have attempted to justify your actions by trotting out some tired old cliché or other about the country’s financial situation.  So if we are to take you at your word then basically what you are saying is that justice is okay if the country is doing quite well, but as it stands we are currently so broke it’s a luxury we can’t afford, it’s a shame but there it is.  Well Sir, I have news for you, it is the duty of every government to insure and protect the basic rights of all persons to life, a decent standard of living, security, dignity, identity, freedom, truth, due process of law, and justice.  Justice is not optional and in your position as Lord Chancellor you should know that before anything or anyone else.

Yours Sincerely,

 

CR Mardell

What's So Wrong With Democracy?

There many models for governing countries; monarchies, republics, ocracies and isms galore.  Well our system is a bit of a hybrid democracy and whilst not being perfect, seems to have worked reasonably well up until now.  I can hear some of the alternatives being bellowed even as I write.  I can even understand a lot of the objections some people have.  However, I think most people in this part of the world seem to think that whatever model they prefer, they believe that it should have a basis in democracy.  If that is the case then will someone please explain to me why we are all sitting practically silent in the face of a deliberate dismantlement of our own democracy. 

This government has embarked on an enormous programme of privatisation of public services going way beyond anything that has been attempted before, some of it has happened overtly such as The Post Office, but much, much more is happening.  I imagine most people still believe we have a National Health Service, a public service staffed by public employees funded directly from taxation. However, that is no longer true.  Piece by piece, and in larger and larger chunks it being 'outsourced', in other words privatised.  Huge parts of the service have been sold off to the lowest bidder with increasingly negative impact on the quality of service provided. This is not a criticism of those people at the coalface of providing the healthcare; they can only do what they can with the resources given them.  Let me explain what I believe the problem is.  I have used this analogy before and I can't claim to be it's author but it's which rather cleverly demonstrates what is happening.  If you think of outsourcing in the following terms:

1. Hold your hand out to one side, level with your shoulder and think of that as the service you are paying for.
2. Now hold your hand out once again this time level with your waist and think of that as the service you are getting.
3. The space in between you can regard as profit for the supplier.

No matter how wrong you might think that is, however enraged you might feel about this enormous earth-shift in policy that is happening without you being consulted, what I have described is only a tiny part of what is happening. They have no electoral mandate for any of this, the Tory party made no reference to privatisation on this scale prior to the last election and they haven't informed us what they were doing or how far they intend to go. In fact the only clue as to what their intentions are is in a quote from Oliver Letwin made in a private meeting prior to the last election, 'the NHS will not exist within five years of a Conservative election victory'.  And as I mentioned earlier, this is only the tip of the of the iceberg. Here are just a few of the services going under the hammer either now or in the near future: Legal Aid, The Land Registry, Crown Prosecution Service, the Fire Service, what is left of the Ambulance Service, and the Police. Yes you did read that correctly 'THE POLICE', West Midlands and Surrey police forces are to be the first up for grabs.

What seems so wrong with this process is not just that this ideological shift has taken place without our knowledge or permission; and not either because we are told it will save money (because in most cases it actually costs more, it just shifts expenditure into a different budget); but many of the companies bidding to take these contracts have long histories of incompetence and fraud.  Many of these company names will be familiar to you such as G4S, Serco, and Capita but there a few others.  Often they are awarded a contract in an area of expertise that they have no history or experience in, purely on the basis of the size of their bid.  The contracts are enormous and so when they fail, the government has to try to find a new contractor at very short notice meaning they may have to pay much more to get the fulfilled. 

I'm not sure that a lot readers will be aware that this is happening, I'm even less sure if many will support it.  But one thing I'm completely certain of is that the only way to stop it is to protest about it to your MP about it. If enough people make enough noise they will have no choice but to rethink.  For those of you that have never written to your MP, it's easy; just go to the BBC News home web page. Near the bottom of the page under 'Democracy Live' there is search box called 'Find a representative'  where you can just type in your postcode and it will take you to the information page for your MP including his/her email address. Just click on the link and send your thoughts off to your parliamentary representative. He/she will normally reply by way of an automated email, and perhaps more formally a week or few later by post.

Divesting Ourselves of Statehood

If any of you out there are still paying attention to any of my rants you may remember that one of my pets subjects has been ‘outsourcing’.  Well today I discovered why this slimy bunch of worthless scum we call a government are so hellfire bent on selling off everything we have, it’s because of something called TTIP.  Ever heard of it?  No, I didn’t think so.  It seems it’s an obscure little deal currently being negotiated between the EU and the US which, to quote EU Commission website is, “The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a trade agreement that is presently being negotiated between the European Union and the United States.  It aims at removing trade barriers in a wide range of economic sectors to make it easier to buy and sell goods and services between the EU and the US.” 

Sounds pretty innocuous doesn’t it?  Unfortunately it isn’t; the ramifications for the UK are absolutely massive.  It will mean that practically every service currently the responsibility of government or local government will be required to be available for tendering by private companies.  That will be schools, hospitals, ambulance services, fire services, possibly police forces, the courts, civil service functions in other words almost everything.

So why haven’t we heard of any of this?  Well once again to quote the EU Commission website, “For trade negotiations to work and succeed, you need a certain degree of confidentiality, otherwise it would be like showing the other player one's cards in a card game.”  Politician speak for “We didn’t want you to know until it’s too late.”

According to David Cameron we are not going to hand over any more powers to the EU without an in/out referendum.  However, included in this little soupcon of legislation is something called “Investor to State Dispute Settlement (ISDS)”.  This a tiny snippet of legislation that to all intents and purposes emasculates a country’s courts in cases where a supplier is in dispute with the state.  To illustrate what this might mean to the UK let me remind you of the recent scandal involving outsourcing companies G4S & Serco overcharging the government by tens of millions of pounds for work on offender tagging contracts that they either didn’t do or they did entirely incorrectly.  Notwithstanding the fact that this corrupt government is in the process of allowing these maleficent organisations to buy their way out of any prosecutions, which in itself smacks of corruption; under TTIP the UK courts would be unable to enforce a punishment if it chose to award one.

I don’t know if the EU’s plans for a federal Europe have yet progressed as far as developing a system of honours and awards; but if and when it does rest assured Cameron and Grayling will be among the first up there to collect their gongs.

I Predict the Ministry of Justice’s Remarks For 7th March

Last Thursday the government issued its final plans for Legal Aid following two ‘consultations’.  As predicted these proposals, many of the changes will come into effect little more than a fortnight from now, and will mean a catastrophe not just for the legal profession but for the administration of justice in this country. 

In a demonstration of the strength of their feelings, on Friday 7^th March 2014, all barristers and most solicitors practicing in criminal law will stay away from court bringing most courts including (magistrates’ courts) to a standstill for the whole day.  This will be only the second time in 500 years that this is happened, the last was on the 9^th January this year when the action lasted only half a day.  This dignified and essential profession feel they have no choice because they believe that the changes proposed by a Justice Secretary without qualifications or experience in the law is making will have disastrous effects on the administration of justice.

In layman’s terms these will be the effects if these changes come into effect:

·         Most people, when accused of a crime will not be able to get a lawyer without paying for one to assist in their defence.  Their choice will be to either represent themselves or maybe to sell their house to pay a lawyer.

·         In the short term, a very large number of small specialist and highly qualified solicitor firms that have been giving expert advice to accused people in police stations and courts for many years will go out of business.

·         In the long term, most of the remaining existing solicitor firms giving advice to accused people will cease to do so.  This will leave the way clear for these services for whole country to be provided by four or five multi-national companies after having tendered down to the lowest possible price.  The ‘lawyers’ employed by these companies will a great deal less qualified and will have a financial incentive to persuade their client to plead guilty (i.e. the same fee for a guilty plea as for a trial).  This will happen in spite of the fact that the government accepted that it would be contrary to justice if clients had no choice of lawyer to represent them and especially in those terms.  But of course this is exactly what the government has wanted all along.

·         The Criminal Bar will be destroyed meaning that it will practically impossible to viably operate as a barrister practicing criminal law.  As barristers both prosecute and defend in criminal cases, these tasks will fall to people a great deal less qualified and many may choose to represent themselves.

·         There be a huge increase in the number of miscarriages of justice caused by people being poorly or unrepresented in court.  Innocent people will be fined or imprisoned for crimes they did not commit and the guilty left to walk the streets.

·         Victims of crime cross-examined by the person they have accused (imagine that in a rape case or if the alleged victim were a child)

·         If people act for themselves the amount of court time spent on the case, and therefore court operating costs will increase exponentially.

·         If people are wrongly convicted or acquitted then retrials, appeals and imprisonment costs will increase enormously.

This is what I predict the government spin will claim on or about Friday:

·         They will claim, “At about £2 billion pa this country has the most expensive Legal Aid system in the world.”  The government has trotted this statistic out like some sort of religious mantra at every opportunity since these proposals were first made in the early part of 2013.  It is not true of course and has been indisputably established to be a myth by people from within and outside the legal profession.  Of the top seventeen developed nations our expenditure on legal aid per capita stands about tenth.  Many other countries have a completely different legal systems, in France and Italy for example their systems are ‘inquisitorial’, where as ours is ‘adversarial’ and defence costs appear in different budgets and therefore cannot be readily compared.  And in any event the cost of criminal legal aid in this country is actually less than £1 billion and falling and has been falling for a number of years.

·         They will say that everybody with a disposable assets of less than £37,000 will still be entitled to Legal Aid.  That is completely misleading because that figure is to include any equity in your home and any savings you might have.

·         The government will imply one way or another that lawyers in general and barristers in particular are overpaid ‘fat-cats’, and will issue yet another set of spurious statistics to support their assertion.  These claims have all been made before and have been completely disproven.  They will release a table of statistics showing that a handful of barristers were paid huge sums of money over a selected period of time; lost in the accompanying small print will be explanations that barristers are not paid until the conclusion of a case and that could be up to 2 years after the event.  Complicated cases can themselves go on for two or more years.  The sums of money paid out will include VAT at 20%.  They will probably not mention that barristers are self-employed and they have considerable operating costs such as chambers fees (possibly 20-25%), professional body fees amounting to hundreds of pounds and travelling costs.  They won’t mention that rather than just turning up at court on the day of the trial there will be many hours of research and preparation in advance, nor will they refer to the junior counsel or expert witnesses that have to be paid.  I anticipate that they won’t mention the average debt of a newly qualified barrister (about £60,000).  The average pay of a barrister is somewhere in the region of about £34,000 per year, £11,000 less than a train driver and broadly comparable with a London bobby.  Many earn a great deal less.

·         The government will also claim that in the current economic climate they have little choice but to make savings and that Legal Aid should not be immune.  This is wrong on just about every level.  Legal Aid fees have already been reduced many times meaning that they are already up to 47% less than they were more than 10 years ago.  This year the budget is already £56 million underspent.  The Criminal Bar has shown that the so-called ‘required’ savings could easily be made by making the Ministry of Justice operate more efficiently; they have demonstrated where these savings can be made but their suggestions have fallen on stony ground.

·         The government will claim that it has listened to what the representative bodies have had to say and made changes to their plans accordingly.  This is not completely true either, they have consistently refused to meet with representatives of the Criminal Bar, except under restrictive reporting conditions (What do they want to keep secret I wonder).  It is true that they have one or two cosmetic changes to their original proposals but none that will prevent the inevitable outcome.

There is a popular opinion around that lawyers are massively overpaid, and who are only in it for the money.  This myth is perpetuated by some TV dramatic interpretations of lawyers.  However, contrary to that widespread view, lawyers working in criminal law are the lowest paid and in a particularly specialised branch of the profession.  Much of the work they do is unpaid and their working week far exceeds that which is commonplace elsewhere, duty solicitors are often called out in the middle of the night to drive to police stations many miles away and attend the interview of an accused person.  If these so-called fat cats were only in it for the money they would not have chosen to work in criminal law in the first place, there are a lot of other more lucrative areas of law. 

The reality is that the administration of justice is an expensive business and to cut costs just to save money to the point where it cannot operate and/or is not available to all is not justice at all.  To quote a former Justice Secretary, "I genuinely believe access to justice is the hallmark of a civilised society."

I hope then, that having read these few remarks, people might take the spin that the Ministry of Justice and the Justice Secretary (a man with a history of telling lies and misleading Parliament) put on things on Friday and view them in a different light.

The Great British Rake Off Part II or Fire Sale of the Century

The media astonish me sometimes, occasionally they latch on to a story and won’t let go until every possible aspect has been explored and exposed.  We can all think of examples; the Iraq war, MPs expenses, numerous Northern Ireland issues, child abuse by priests and Jimmy Saville.  But there another even more obvious scandal happening at present and most of the press seem to be treating it like a ‘dog bites man’ story and concentrating on things that happened years ago.  For example, however sensational and titillating gossip about what some of our prominent politicians may or may not have been doing in the 70s is; and it may indeed be interesting or worthwhile knowing about in the long term.  It is not as important as what they currently doing, things that govern our present and dictate our future that surely should be occupying their time and our minds.

This government is in the process of selling off our public services to the private sector at a rate never seen before.  They are making Thatcher's government look like a street corner barrowman by comparison.  They have no mandate to do what they are doing and yet the magnitude of their actions is breath-taking.  And much of what has been and is being done is irretrievable, in other words ‘When It’s Gone It’s Gone’.  We hear the words 'academy' but not private school, we hear 'foundation hospital' not private hospital; and yet that what we've got.  Some might think 'but surely that's okay isn't it?  Aren't private schools and hospitals operated to a higher standard than state run ones?'  Well if you imagine a private hospital run by a private healthcare company with patients funded by private health insurance that may be so.  Or perhaps if you imagine a private school funded by the wealthy parents of its pupils at thousands of pounds a term.  But don't imagine that that is what academies or foundation hospitals are like.  Many will be run by and for the profit of shareholders of enormous companies (many from overseas) whose sole raison d'etre is provide the lowest possible service level for the highest possible price and to make the greatest possible profit margin.

Why am I returning to this theme you might ask?  Well this is an extremely important time, this is a week where the government has revealed that ‘E-ACT, one of England’s biggest academy chains, is to be stripped of almost a third of its schools amid serious concerns over education standards’.  This piece of news reveals so much more than just what it says.  First of all E-ACT is only one of England’s academy chains!  My children have long since grown up and left home so I was more than a little surprised to learn that there was such a thing as a ‘chain’ of academies.  I imagined that the whole point of these so-called academies was that they were independent.  On its website, E-ACT proudly claims that they, ‘have a proven national record of developing schools into high attaining institutions and were delighted to celebrate a fourth year of improvements across all E-ACT academies in 2012’.  Well so much for the improvement and their national record then.  It was also interesting to read that they claim to be ‘sponsors’ of education.  I had always thought that a sponsor in this context was a person or organisation that contributes towards the costs of something, not an organisation that takes public money to provide a service.

This episode with academies is just the latest in a long list of privatisation adventures by the coalition.  The entirety of these policies is a scandal of monumental proportions.  Public money is routinely being given to private companies who cannot or will not provide the services they are paid to.  The welfare state in all its facets is being systematically dismantled by a government that has no mandate to do it.  They claim it is an ideological thing, as if that makes it okay to do it without seeking an electoral mandate to make such an enormous shift in public service policy.  They say that the ideology is that by moving things to the private sector it creates wealth that we all benefit from; however, the only wealth that is being created is for the shareholders and executives of huge corporate companies who mostly pay their taxes abroad.  It was recently revealed that at least two of the biggest of these companies paid zero corporation tax in the UK last year.  They claim that these changes will save money; that is not true either, mostly they only appear to save money by shifting additional costs into a different budget.  For example when making the changes to Legal Aid this will add enormous costs to court operating costs whilst appearing to make Legal Aid cheaper.

All this would be absolutely fine I suppose if we actually were saving money and/or being provided with the better services we have been promised, except of course we are not.  Time and time again we see examples of privatised services coming short of the standards expected, repeatedly we find service providers unable to fulfil the promises they made when taking the contract, some even having to relinquish the task, unable provide even the unexacting standards demanded by this government.  We even see examples of deliberate fraud where the government is billed for services never provided or asked for.  You could be forgiven for thinking that these failings are rare and or only of insignificant sums amounts because sometimes they barely get a mention in much of the press.  They disappear from the front pages to be replaced by news of Simon Cowles baby or other such trivial nonsense.

Whenever some new titbit of public service comes up for sale the usual suspects are there slavering at the bit, waiting to get their greasy little fingers on another little piece of the action.  It matters not that these companies mostly have no history in providing that service; or that many do have a long and proven history of incompetence and/or fraud.  Indeed many of these companies can boast ministers and MPs as shareholders.

This week also marks a tragedy for Britain with the final nail in the coffin of our reputation for being a just and fair nation, and being considered a beacon for justice throughout the world.  Today the government have announced their final plans for Legal Aid.  These plans will inevitably, in the short term, lead to the closure of hundreds of small solicitors firms with all their highly qualified and support staff finding themselves out of work.  In the longer term the system will become unviable leaving the way clear for one of the usual suspects to move in and employ poorly qualified staff to represent accused people in court.  Or worse still, people forced to defend themselves in court.  The long established Criminal Bar which both defends and prosecutes people accused of criminal offences may actually not survive.  There will be many miscarriages of justice innocent people found guilty, perhaps even jailed for crimes they did not commit, and the guilty left to walk the streets and possibly re-offend.  If you were the victim of rape would you want to be cross-examined in court by the accused because he couldn’t get a lawyer?

The changes announced today will NOT save money but will indeed increase costs.  They have been condemned almost unanimously by every section of the legal profession, ie barristers, judges, magistrates, solicitors, legal executives and court interpreters.  Even the government’s own lawyers have criticised them.  And yet Chris Grayling the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice is pushing them through.  This is a man who has absolutely no training or experience in the law, has consistently used spurious statistics, misled parliament on a number of occasions and made defamatory remarks about the legal profession in order to support his arguments.  Has been found to have lied on several occasions.  A man who claimed thousands of pounds to decorate a second home yet lives only 16 miles from parliament; and who employs his wife as his secretary at £37,000 pa cost to the nation.

There are many aspects of the these changes that are wrong, and I have covered most of them in earlier postings of my blog, but suffice it to say that our Criminal Justice System is just the latest of our public services being sacrificed on the altar of profit.

For your information:

A list of some of the companies that are buying us up:

G4S, Serco, Capita, Atos, E-ACT

A list of some services that have been sold off or are about to be:

Court interpreting, disability assessments, schools, hospitals, legal aid lawyers (defence & prosecution), prisons, police back office functions, prisoner transport, fire service, pension payments, council office functions, many NHS services, probation services.

So Much For Enterprise and Ambition Then

So then the philosophy of this government is, if you work hard at school you can gain a place at university where you can pay £9000 per year for 9 - 15 hours per week tuition.  Once you graduate (with debts between £30 - 45,000) this will enable you to get a job (or probably not) with a salary barely above minimum wage, out of which you must:

·         Feed and clothe yourself (although your parents will probably have to do that until you’re at least 25;

·         House yourself (parents might do that for nothing until they are in their dotage).  If your parents are not completely without resources by now they may be able to give you the money for the 5% deposit on a house enabling you to try to buy a house with the government’s ‘Help To Buy Scheme’ (HTBS).; and if you have been particularly fortunate and your job pays significantly above minimum wage you might be able to afford the repayments in the quarter-million pound loan you have had to take out.
The HTBS is a government initiative designed to provide profits to builders that make large donations to party funds.  It has the unique advantages of pushing up the prices of houses making it look as if prosperity has returned to this bankrupt country so that you will be persuaded to vote for them at the next election.  Of course there is minor disadvantage that when interest rates start to rise, which they will inevitably have to, even a very tiny rise will have enormous consequences on mortgage borrowers as the size of their loans are so large.  This of course has the effect that many will not be able to afford them and will have their houses repossessed, leaving them in a position where they have to return to live with Mum and Dad or rent a house from one of the ever burgeoning role private landlords costing as much or more as their previous mortgage with the help (if they can get it) of welfare payments.  Alternatively they could just go on the streets, many already choose this option.
However we should not forget that the banks (who made the unsustainable loan in the first place) will then own what used to be their house which they can then sell and make a profit from the process.  Does any of this seem familiar?

·         Oh yes you must not forget, you will need to start saving for a pension because by the time you need to retire you will need to be about 103 to be eligible for the State Pension even if your body gave up about 35 years earlier.

Well you shouldn’t feel too bad about it, you could always sit and read your degree certificate while you sit round a fire on a piece of waste ground somewhere and recall those halcyon days of academia.  Perhaps you could swap tales with those around who chose to take up law and burdened themselves with even greater debt by becoming criminal barristers or solicitors only to have their professions destroyed and handed to people who didn’t bother to go to university, and those whose small businesses were asset stripped by big firms prepared to do a sub-standard job for a pittance and who pay little more than the minimum wage to their employees.

You shouldn’t feel too down of course, out of every tale of woe there shines a little light.  There will be plenty of people to benefit from the wonderful policies of this government even when the economy goes tits up again as it inevitably will.  There are the millionaire politicians whose nests are well and truly lined the executives and shareholders of their party donors (such as big outsourcing companies and builders) and we must remember the bankers.

Money, Money, Money, It’s a Rich Man’s World Part II

Whoever wins the next election will have an almighty mess to clear up. There have been many reforming governments in the past but none have gone about their business with such reckless zeal.  None have set out on their mission without even a recognised objective let alone a fall back plan if it should all go wrong.  This administration will leave in its wake a set of public services in total disarray.  NHS, CJS, welfare payments, disability services, armed forces, social care etc. the ambition of these adventurers is almost boundless.  It would be nice to imagine that their plan was motivated purely by ideology, however on the basis that much of what is happening is not just a move to the private sector.  The fact that these many of these moves are targeted at small businesses (something the government has claimed they want to actively support) that leads one to suspect something altogether more sinister is happening.  For example Legal Aid lawyers are already in the private sector most in small practices and not a corporate multi-national.  Why would that make a difference?  They would have us believe it is to save money, but experience has proven that it could well cost a good deal more than tried, tested and successful existing arrangements.  Maybe because in a large budget the opportunity for maladministration is far greater it can be made to look like it is saving money.  However, there far more sinister interpretations that can be placed on their motives.

They have set out on a path to ruthlessly destroy public services by privatising practically everything that remained in the public sector when they came to power.  Amongst the things they have privatised is the court interpreter service (another small business).  The whole process has been an unmitigated disaster; court cases being delayed or failing altogether because the contractors have sent the wrong interpreter, the interpreter has been late or they have sent nobody at all, costing hundreds of thousands of pounds in wasted court time.  But apart from that most of the interpreters are unqualified which in itself can often lead to miscarriages of justice.  Interpreting for court purposes is a highly qualified profession not only do they have to be extremely well versed in each of the languages they are to express, but they need to be able to ensure that everything that is said by one party is clearly understood by the other including any nuances and colloquialisms.  To be able to do this takes knowledge, training and skill, there are specific qualifications required and those that undertake it do so under oath.  However at the moment many of those sent by contractors don’t always have these qualifications and often struggle to make themselves understood let alone interpret others.  The spin off effect of this change has been that hundreds of highly qualified interpreters have found themselves without work, and with all that entails. 

Proposed changes to Legal Aid provisions are inevitably going to have a similar effect with thousands of highly qualified professionals put out of work overnight and their work given to poorly qualified people.  Up and down the country barristers and solicitors with families, mortgages and business loans will find themselves out of a job.  Well, I know that lawyers don’t always attract a great deal of sympathy from some of us more modestly qualified people.  We read expressions such ‘fat-cat lawyers’ bandied about by the tabloid press, there are reports of barristers earning £400,000 pounds which may be true but it does not those who work in criminal law.  The average income of a barrister in criminal law (who is self-employed therefore a small business) is in the region of £35,000 out of which they have to pay VAT at 20% , chambers fees at 15-25%, practicing licence fees, professional body fees, pension and in many cases travel costs to courts which can be anywhere in the country.  It costs on average £60,000 to qualify to be a barrister and can take eight years during which time they have to live.  In the light of this their pay might easily be considered too low rather than too high (in comparison a train driver earns around £45,000). 

These two examples of the ridiculous overzealous policies of this government are both within the legal system although there are many, many more.  A fair robust criminal justice system, available to all is a cornerstone of any society wishing to call itself civilised, and the changes I have referred to will in themselves fatally flaw ours.  We do not want justice in our country administered by poorly qualified people; we want innocent people exonerated, guilty people punished and protection from injustice.  With the destruction of the Criminal Bar and solicitors who currently practice in criminal law put out of business, miscarriages of justice will become commonplace.

As can be seen, the victims of this government’s policies though are not only amongst those groups normally considered most vulnerable.  One is driven to conclude that destroying the professions is a deliberate tactic in their overall strategy.

If you want to employ someone to carry out a large difficult yet crucial job for you, say an extension on your house, how do you go about it?  Would you perhaps speak to people who have had done this sort of work before, maybe you might go to see similar works that have been completed elsewhere.  Certainly you would want to see evidence that any people you might consider for the job were competent, honest and reliable.  I doubt you would employ anybody you had used before who had been repeatedly incompetent, someone who had surreptitiously billed you for work they hadn’t done, and definitely not someone who had deliberately defrauded you.  You surely wouldn’t use someone that costs you huge amounts to rectify their mistakes so any savings that might have been made are nullified. 

Nonetheless this is what this government is repeatedly doing with its outsourcing programme.  There are numerous examples court interpreters, offender tagging, prisoner transportation, disability assessments, and police back-office services etcetera.  Some have argued that their ideology is explained that by putting work into the private sector contributes to the country's economy.  Well that may be so, but surely that only works if the companies involved actually pay tax in this country; also if those that are employed by them can earn a reasonable wage.  However, most of these multi-national companies pay very little tax here and some none at all and their employees often earn little more than the minimum wage and/or are on zero-hour contracts.  The actual logic behind large-scale privatisation was once described to me like this.  Hold your hand out to one side level with your shoulder; that represents the service you pay for.  Now hold your hand out to one side at waist level; that represents the service you actually get.  Everything in between is profit.

So if it's not for ideological reasons that the government do it, and it's not to save money it leaves only two possible reasons and they are, complete mind-numbing stupidity or corruption.  From that draw your own conclusions, but these politicians can be accused of a lot of things but not stupidity.

I gather that HM Coastguard and the fire service are now on the wish list for this treatment.  Nothing is sacred, the scale of this government’s aspirations has been made abundantly clear are from a speech made by Oliver Letwin, currently Minister of State in the cabinet office, in 2005 said, “There will be no NHS within five years of a Conservative election victory.”  In a television interview on Sunday George Osborne complimented himself and his party on how well they were doing all the while displaying a smug smile that competed to outshine even that of Ed Balls seated next to him.  He stated that the UK could no longer afford a welfare state, but gave no explanation how that could be true when we could afford to build a railway that nobody wants, and most people can’t use and couldn’t afford to use if they could.  Neither did he explain why the economy can afford to pay six-figure salaries and enormous bonuses to executives of outsourcing companies who do not achieve what they are paid to