23rd November 2021
The criminal justice system veers between chaos and crisis, if those two extreme states can be distinguished.
To quote the Law Society Gazette:
“The government has admitted that nearly £500m awarded by chancellor Rishi Sunak last month to bring down the Crown court backlog will reduce it by only 7,000 over three years.
“Justice minister James Cartlidge told the House of Commons yesterday that the extra £477m allocated in the Treasury’s spending review last month for the criminal justice system ‘will allow us to reduce Crown court backlogs caused by the pandemic from 60,000 today to an estimated 53,000 by March 2025’.
“According to a National Audit Office report, the Crown court backlog increased by 23% in the year leading up to the pandemic, increasing from 33,290 on 31 March 2019 to 41,045 on 31 March 2020.
“The backlog increased a further 48% since the onset of the pandemic, to 60,692 cases on 30 June 2021.”
The criminal justice system is currently being held together by (ahem) a wig and a prayer.
Last weekend there was the Bar conference, where the Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary Dominic Raab was invited to address those barristers who are (somehow) keeping the criminal justice system going, along with court officials, solicitors and others.
The Lord Chancellor did not turn up.
His civil servants sent a video recording instead.
Lord Chancellor sent a recorded message.
It was greeted with absolute silence at its conclusion. There was no appetite for even a polite handclap.
There remains no inclination from Lord Chancellor to meet either Chair/Vice Chair @TheCriminalBar or Chair @thebarcouncil #BarConf— Kirsty Brimelow KC (@Kirsty_Brimelow) November 20, 2021
It was an extraordinary exercise in political absenteeism.
And where was the Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary instead of engaging with legal professionals?
The Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary was with a roller-skating Christmas pudding:
Great to open the Christmas festival in Walton today – wonderful to see the community out enjoying the festive fun, including the roller-skating Christmas pudding! pic.twitter.com/xsBPxs2KZw
— Dominic Raab (@DominicRaab) November 20, 2021
And why was the Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary with a roller-skating Christmas pudding?
Because he is a politician with a marginal constituency and, on a cost-benefit analysis, it is more politically advantageous for him to be there rather than at the Bar conference.
And, in a way, this a direct outcome of the change in the Lord Chancellorship in 2005, where the office ceased to be exclusive to a senior and experienced lawyer in the House of Lords (and usually their last job) and became just another political job for a politician in a hurry.
The selfie is a perfect exemplar of the choices that now have to be made by any justice secretary, after the 2005 reform opened the office to political careerists.
It was therefore only a matter of time that an occupant of the old office of Lord Chancellor would openly put politics above the legal system when there was a choice to be made.
That said, a Lord Chancellor happily advertising their absenteeism with a selfie with a roller-skating Christmas pudding was perhaps less predictable.
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Jaw dropping and deeply worrying. Lack of a constitution may be the reason for appointing such a person to such a job. Dear me, we are in a mess.
Is it time to call time on all cases pending, free pardon to all, regardless, and start again.
“ That said, a Lord Chancellor happily advertising their absenteeism with a selfie with a roller-skating Christmas pudding was perhaps less predictable.”
That would have been unconditionally. But conditionally on the Lord Chancellor being the same guy that, as Foreign Secretary, was on holiday while Afghanistan was falling…
Code name, call sign, “The Geography Teacher”?
Difficult choice. Do your job or have a photo opportunity that only benefits you. Raab can be relied upon to take the easy option. The sea was closed but the rink was open.
“Once they enter the workplace, the British are among the worst idlers in the world. We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor.”
Britannia Unchained – Global Growth and Prosperity, authored by Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore and Elizabeth Truss.
Well after all having been introduced to the pudding Mr Raab could hardly have refused to join in as “it isn’t etiquette to cut any one you’ve been introduced to,” although in her turn Alice managed rather better by stating, “I won’t be introduced to the pudding, please” .
If I were that nice Mr Raab I might think the legal profession could do with a bit of starvation and contempt. The pandemic might just be a useful weapon with which to kick it into a shape somewhat more to Raab’s (and Boris’s) liking. Hence the skating Xmas pud.
Now at its best our legal system delivers Rolls Royce results but even its kindest supporters might suspect it has just a teensy tendency to be ridiculously slow, expensive and give very mixed results. We might take a look at the French and German court system to see what their backlog looks like and how they are handling it. But we won’t.
Then if I were in Raab’s shoes I might seek to curry favour by erasing such inconveniences as human rights, trial by jury, inspection of prisons and so on. Not that I would openly say so, but my funding and nudges might press that way.
Further, giving the lawyers, judges and courts a good kicking might take some of the heat off poor Mrs Patel and her lovely, kind, honest and competent Home Office (don’t mention Windrush).
For an ambitious (and nasty) politician Covid and Brexit and a legal logjam might look a golden opportunity not to be screwed up.
I defer to no-one in my dislike of Mr Raab, but I fear that putting all the blame for the troubles of the court system on politicians is only a part of the story. To the lay person the inefficiency of the whole system is appalling. The time wasted by advocates with the consent of ex-advocate judges goes back at least as far as the time of Dickens. Insisting on having advocates or former advocates as Lord Chancellor at the top of the legal heap only further compounds the problem.
Tellingly, the Secret Barrister lays about everyone in the system except barristers themselves.
What is the legal equivalent of “Physician, heal thyself?”
Raab isn’t responsible for the current long delays, but his party is responsible and it’s his responsibility to sort the problem out.
You call it wasted time, but if it was your case they were arguing you would want them to cover every possible avenue to ensure you got justice. I doubt anyone would want to reduce their chances of a good outcome by having to work against a time limit.
Whilst Keir Starmer’s fans were swooning on Monday over the Confederation of British Industry’s conference being nice about their idol and all the media attention was on Boris Johnson and Peppa Pig, Michael Gove was working the room at the Tory dominated County Council Network.
Gove’s promises to the gathering included providing a date for elections for the new Somerset unitary local authority before Christmas, along with devolution “County deals” proposals, too.
He said, “Yes” in reply to a question about whether or not the new planning White Paper would include a requirement for zero carbon homes.
I have solid, practical green credentials, you know, unlike you know who …
To a rumble of (rapturous?) support from the audience he stated, “We are reviewing the position of Local Enterprise Partnerships. My preference is that powers, including development powers, rest with democratically elected bodies.”
A delegate, falling in love with Mike, asked, will the planning White Paper look at the issue of developers wriggling out of infrastructure payments (Section 106 agreements to the cognoscenti) on the grounds of viability concerns?
I am aware of this issue their new found hero replied. I will look to see if a viability test can be firmed up.
He tickled their tummies.
They purred in response.
He thought, I have recruited my whips, if my qualities for the leadership of my party must be tested by the mob, sorry, most intelligent electorate in the world.
If Gove becomes the next Tory Prime Minister, Harold MacMillan’s Night of the Long Knives may well be eclipsed.
Surely, out will go Slim, Frosty, the Geography Teacher, Madam Whiplash …
Uriah Heap will probably be moved sideways.
Offering him the Home Office whether he accepted it or not would effectively and nicely neutralise him.
I am not sure as to the possible fate of the (Saintly) Globe Trotter, the Dangerwoman of the Cabinet.
Come what may, there will surely be plenty of sweeties to offer to those Young Turks of the Red Wall, Oop North, to garner their votes during a Tory leadership campaign and guarantee their loyalty, thereafter.
Someone might, perhaps, like to look up Gove’s past legal opinions?
Raab spent quite some time this morning justifying proposed changes to impose a mandatory life sentence on anyone convicted of killing a police officer or other emergency worker while on duty.
I though we had mandatory life sentences for murder already, so this must be about other forms of homicide involving a lesser degree of culpability (e.g. pushing someone over, who has an unseen vulnerability and dies as a result, but without an intention to kill or cause serious harm – shades of Ian Tomlinson here).
Is this the priority, over and above addressing the discrepancy between reports of sexual assault and rape, and prosecutions and convictions, for example? How many cases of manslaughter are there each year involving emergency workers on duty? Is this just populist window dressing, distracting from the appallingly neglected and underfunded state of our criminal courts and prisons?
Just as the law is not a suitable place to “enshrine” policy, but with due respect to the bereaved, it also seems an odd place to memorialise the dead with eponymous laws. This one appears to be Harper’s Law, rather than the competing proposal of Andrew’s law (20 year minimum, with no discounts). https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-berkshire-54149385
Sarah’s law, Clare’s law, Natasha’s law… how many of these things do we have already?
He appears to be in breach of his duty under C.R.A. 2005, s. 17(1)(2).
Having lived in Walton, it is an amazing feat to have turned a super safe seat into a marginal. Raab comes across as one of those people who is super dim and thinks that they are super smart e.g. Dover crossing.
Yes – it’s an astonishing achievement.