22nd August 2022
The criminal Bar has voted to go on strike – that is to not accept any new instructions after 5 September 2022.
Elsewhere on the internet you will find detailed and persuasive accounts of why the criminal Bar has resorted to this – for example here.
The action will cause pain – trials and other hearings that those involved have spent months and years waiting for will now not go ahead.
The added stress for victims and the accused is probably unimaginable for the rest of us.
People’s lives will be ruined further.
Yet.
The barristers’ strike is not really the cause of the problems with the criminal justice system, but more the effect of deeper problems.
This is a criminal justice system that may well have collapsed before now, and it is only by luck it has survived this long.
Like the “good chaps” theory of the constitution, the criminal justice system is in part held together by the goodwill of many of those involved,
For example, self-employed Barristers will take on cases at extreme short notice, and will do work (and travel considerable distances) on life-changing cases and not get paid.
And this goodwill has been exploited.
Legal aid fees are now at a level where it is impossible for junior barristers to survive.
The situation is not sustainable.
*
Politicians and time-poor, copy-hungry news reporters like the easy assertions of “tougher sentences” and “crackdowns” – but that is a mere fictional diversion when there is a functioning criminal justice system.
And if the criminal Bar now just drops hands, then it is difficult to see how the system can continue – indeed, to see whether it still constitutes a “system” at all.
This is what the strike signifies.
The strike signifies that a crucial part of our polity is not functioning – the part that is there to provide justice for both victims and the accused, the part that deals with coercive sanctions and punishments, and so perhaps the most important part of any organised society.
And the government and the media do not care, for as long as they can type and shout “Law and Order!” in return for clicks and cheers it is irrelevant that there is no law being applied, and and no order being imposed.
The political-media construct of “Law and Order!” does not correspond to the mundane, inefficient reality of the criminal justice system.
They are two distinct things, with no direct connection between them.
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Fully support the strike action. Yes, it will be painful, but that is true of all strikes, and makes them regrettable rather than wrong.
On top of their general anti-strike sentiment, the government and right wing press will no doubt double down on the ‘greedy / fat cat / lefty lawyer’ tropes, despite all evidence to the contrary in criminal law.
I do wonder what the Daily Express will make of it though, given that their journalists are now apparently planning their own strike action. Maintaining an editorial anti-strike policy when those writing the articles and headlines are pro-strike will be challenging!
“Maintaining an editorial anti-strike policy when those writing the articles and headlines are pro-strike will be challenging!”
I think the word you’re looking for their is “hilarious”.
Challenging too, no doubt, but let’s see them spin that…
The Express will probably just hire scabs, and hide the names on the bylines, like MailOnline do when they’re churning out lies that nobody wants to take reputational responsibility for.
I worked for HMRC when the coalition came into power in 2010. One of the first changes was the move to civil settlements of tax disputes and the ending of criminal prosecutions, when HMRC [and other state departments] were major drivers of demand for the courts.
The knew when they first started the policies that the reduction of demand for court services from the state would allow them to impose austerity by stealth. The running down was done deliberately and was started longer ago than many would realise.
Now there is little capacity to prosecute those who have illegally benefitted from the Chumocracy… the public can easily be convinced that the scare resources must be used to prosecute rapists, illegal immigrants or whoever else is currently a public enemy.
The editors and contributors to The Private Eye should form a body to advise future Governments,
Not sure about this. Austerity was mostly imposed through cuts in local government grants and the cap on Council Tax. That allowed the Government to maintain the fiction there hadn’t been any government spending cuts. Local authorities, especially Labour run ones, were blames for inefficiency when the problem was, and remains, lack of funds to maintain services. So bad it now affects Tory counties and districts.
Reducing prosecutions of tax evaders and doing deals with them instead is corruption by another name, but isn’t a driver of austerity. Cuts in HMRC budgets also led to reductions in investigating tax evaders, let alone penalising them. Not only that, while Messrs Cameron and Osborne went on about closing tax loopholes they were actually creating new ones.
You’re spot on about Private Eye. They are usually way ahead of the game in terms of revealing what’s really going on with the elites that control things.
Exploitation of the criminal bar’s good will is gone way past even taking the Mickey. Funny how governments – & especially this government – progress from “it’s good of you to do all these extras” to not only regarding the extras as compulsory but piling on both more of them & intolerable stress into the bargain; & on top of that then lying about why the system has collapsed & who has collapsed it. Blaming barristers when the whole framework (police, courts, probation, social services, mental health provision, prisons) needs wholesale refunding & rebuilding is gross dishonesty
I’ve been aware of this since reading “The Secret Barrister”, which is more than sobering enough to leave one worrying that we have any such thing as “justice” in our courts today.
I find myself thinking of a rather ugly little acronym to describe what’s going on – PRS. Probem-Reaction-Solution. It works like this…
Say you’re in government and you want to bring in a change – in this case to the justice system – which you know will be extremely unpopular and bring all sorts of criticism down on you. Suppose for example you wanted to curtail the right of a trial by a jury of peers even more than it has been curtailed today. You want to “streamline” the justice system, to reduce costs and accelerate the conveyor belt of the guilty as they wend their weary way to prison.
But if you stimply stood up and stated that as your intention, you would be hounded out of office. So no, that won’t work.
But what if…. what if you were to starve the justice system in the UK of funds until everything got to the breaking point. What if you crushed the entire system until the pips squeaked, then crushed it some more. At that point, your self-created “Problem” would have the press and the legal profession and MPs and citizens up in arms, all demanding that, “Something Must Be Done!” This is the “Reaction” that you wanted to provoke.
At this point, ever so reluctantly, you acknowledge the struggle and declare that, well, there is something you could do… and you wheel out your “Solution”. A “solution” that is barely that even in name and which under close scrutiny reveals its true colours to be anything but a solution – more a travesty wrapped in injustice and wearing efficiency as a disguise.
You wheel out your “solution” – the erosion of yet more rights under the law. The people who are most seriously impacted by it are, of course, the lowest in society; perhaps the 2nd- or 3rd-time-around convicts; perhaps those charged with shoplifting or burglary or something else that you can squeeze out of Crown Court and back to the Mags… or maybe you could push direct to fines or similar.
Many observers will rebel, recoiling from your “solution” as if it were a venomous snake, recognising the thing for the trojan horse it is. But by then you will be victorious and your nay-sayers thwarted, for you will have implemented the change and you will have some impeccably well statistics from a terrified civil servant to back up your claims.
All in time for Conference Season, “Law and Order!”, “Law and Order!”
In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher provoked the Miners’ Strike as a carefully planned campaign to kill off the power of unions in this country. It was and has been by and large an incredible, overwhelming success [for government] given the near-total absence of strikes ever since. Apart from anything else, the government have introduced so many hurdles that have to be cleared before you can legally strike that you’d have more luck of winning the lottery.
So the fact that our Legal Profession are feeling it *necessary* to do this: 1) is as informative as an entire book would be; and, 2) should make us very worried indeed.
There is an old adage: “Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.” This is almost universally true. Except where government is concerned, in which case your odds are 50:50, if not higher in favour of actual malice. Which is a very depressing thought.
Exactly the plan. For legal system read also NHS.
Complete agreement as far as the NHS is concerned. The actual situation that the NHS is directly the result of malicious forethought on the part of those in power.
Although, to be fair, in the case of the justice system the idea is to take it away from people. In the case of the NHS the plan is to run it in to the ground so badly that the public complains and the “solution” will be, “Well, hey, there are all these American Healthcare Providers, we could ask them to come in the UK and offer medical cover…”
At which point, unless you have obscene levels of medical insurance, you’re in a bad way – where a trip to A&E could end up costing you thousands – or tens of thousands – of pounds if you’re not properly insured.
The scary thing is that the groundwork has been finished already. Even if it isn’t visible to us as tax-paying customers, many elements of the NHS are already “out to tender” on the “internal market”, with literally thousands of “contract managers” and “practice managers”.
A friend of mine worked as a clinical psychologist in the Bristol area – for one of the contractors. He attended meetings where the “client” told him, face to face, that they *wanted* to simply offer to bring the service back in house – but were being *prevented* from doing so by Whitehall. Even though they could show it would be cheaper. Even though the practitioners wanted it. The reason everything is being kept “as-is” was explained as being in readiness for a broader tendering process [to offer external and international providers].
“At which point, unless you have obscene levels of medical insurance, you’re in a bad way – where a trip to A&E could end up costing you thousands – or tens of thousands – of pounds if you’re not properly insured.”
And to remain insured you have to endure intrusive and demeaning examinations and tests every year. See Barbara Ehrenreich, Natural Causes.
Also include the ‘administrative justice’ system – Ombudsman, Information Commissioner and all the other bodies politicians have devised to keep themselves at ‘arms length’ from reality.
Well, we already have the Single Justice Procedure – certain sorts of relatively low-level criminal cases that are decided by a single magistrate, on the papers, without a formal hearing, if the defendant pleads guilty, or does not respond to the notice they are meant to get. Guilty, guilty, guilty. Very efficient. Over 500,000 cases in 2020.
A core element of the UK is failing if we can’t afford to maintain a functional criminal justice system.
Ditto NHS
One of the few protections we have against this government is their sheer ineptitude. They put forward their cunning wheezes much less successfully now because we now understand the bag of tricks they use and why and how these work to our harm.
What’s typical is that government announces – with pzazz and noisy fanfares – a plan to safeguard us all against the specific horrors (eg runaway increases in the costs of living) it failed to avoid, limit or mitigate when it had the opportunity to do so. Government expects to bask in the gratitude and delight of a naive, panicky citizenry because it’s ANNOUNCED this plan. Government seemingly doesn’t intend to deliver anything like what they promised.
The main tools government uses to promise much and deliver little are to ensure very few people get the expensive help they’ve been promised; they don’t get the timely help they’d expected; and new conditions limit the value of the offering.
The citizenry have now learnt to distrust this government’s initiatives from get-go. So government no longer gets any popular credit for what they claim to be offering; and voters aren’t (much) disappointed by government’s failure to deliver. The worst consequences are that terrifying threats to the UK’s future remain unresolved and the public’s lack of confidence in its government also grows.
“Like the “good chaps” theory of the constitution, the criminal justice system is in part held together by the goodwill of many of those involved,”
It strikes me – as an early-retired civil servant of 40-odd years service – that this is true of many (arguably most) in public service.
We really are taken advantage of at every turn, and abused at the same time by governmental policies (cuts to our jobs, conditions, pensions and redundancy rights routinely pay for tax cuts for the Tory faithful) and by the Right wing media.
So it’s deeply ironic – and even more amusing – that I read today (as Paul also points out up the page) that staff in the fanatically anti-strike Daily Express are about to go on strike..!
You might find that there’s a big difference at the Express between the views of management, senior editorial team & columnists on the one hand & those of reporters, sub-editors, graphic artists, photographers (if they have any left) & others (not sure whether advertising is balloting) who make up the majority of staff. Things may well have changed, of course.
Anyway, if the reporters are on strike they, obviously, will not be the ones writing articles.
This needs saying aloud and on every media outlet! Thank you for putting it here.
Stark reality colliding with widespread wishful thinking is true recipe for disaster.
I am bracing hard.
It seems to me that the court system is merely the latest example of publicly funded services undergoing ridiculously unsustainable cuts – NHS, education, police service, fire service, armed forces, civil service… You name it – it’s been savagely cut.
I agree : this is my view and it started with George Osbourne.
And the worrying thing to consider is: if all the public sector services are being cut so savagely (and I agree, they are), then pray where is all the tax money going?
Just a few examples of stealthy tax changes:-
– Adding 2.5% to VAT to subsidise the Community Charge – then leaving the VAT hike in place after converting back to Council Tax…
– Introducing University Fees for courses that were previously 100% funded from central taxation, but not cutting income tax accordingly…
– Putting a LifeTime Allowance (LTA) cap on pensions, with a punitive tax rate
Yet amidst all of these *increases* for the average person two other things are happening. First, the rate of taxation for “big business” is dropping. Secondly, public services are getting worse.
If you step back and look at the trend over 30, 40 years, what you find is a gradual shift of the burden of taxation away from those most able to afford it and on to those who struggle the most.
This is by design, not accident.
Pre-pandemic, public spending as % of gdp was consistently at a higher level than during the Blair years. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/government-spending-to-gdp (Click 25 yr tab to see longer record) Clearly it increased substantially during the financial crisis, for special reasons. But with so much money being spent during the teen years of the century, that crisis eventually long past, it does make one ask where the money was going and why seemingly it wasn’t sufficiently available for public services, when previously public spending was rather lower.
Part of the issue is that demand for public services has gone up, as also has the cost of providing an acceptable service. Though I never feel I have really got to the bottom of why money is so tight for the public services, when there seems to be so much money being spent.
But when you look at the tax levels of other wealthy NW European countries, you soon realise that we can’t have the public services we hope for on our levels of taxation. https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-united-kingdom.pdf The British electorate don’t like to know that. Realistic tax for our public service ambitions remains an election-losing policy in this country.
I remember an episode of The Thick of It where, in the absence of a policy announcement, Hugh Abbot gives a speech about just doing the job and getting on with things. While he declares it a “fucking disaster” afterwards I think that’s what we need across the board. The government is obsessed with coming up with some bright policy idea that nobody has thought of before when the reality is that they just need to fund and run things properly. Not everything has a neat solution, most things just need graft.
The Crown Defence Service being today’s bright policy idea instead of just funding and running things properly.
Well Liz Truss has famously said that British workers need more graft. What are the chances of her leading by example?
I used to think that Russian leaders were so callous treating their country and countrymen as a resource to be exploited, because they learned from the mongols who racketed Russ leaders for so long. But some here have similar notions.
Unless and until the tories figure out how to make money from the justice system, it will rust. As the other public services mentioned. The Brexit party has taken over the tories in England, just as the FN has taken over the Republican party in France. As for the US…. to think that pre-2008 some of us thought we were gradually getting out of the woods. Hahahahahahahaha…..
Having given up private legal practice years ago after numerous monthly computer printouts proved I was working longer hours for reduced rewards the only thing that surprises me here is that there is still a junior criminal bar.
Don’t worry, the government will bring in agency workers.
“Not everything has a neat solution, most things just need graft.”
As we have recently been told, the British people need a bit more graft.
I trust that you’re not implying that I share the views of Truss in that context.
Though that being said, I’m sure I remember getting away with doing the minimum possible work being a British value back in the day. The sacred regular tea break, as illuminated by Cribbins himself in the song ‘Right Said Fred’.
Wasn’t Tristan Ward being ironic?
maybe a little bit :-)
“I trust that you’re not implying that I share the views of Truss in that context.”
Not at all. As someone else once said, “for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” Truss’s graft comment was that kind of answer; I took your’s to be the opposite – that is finding the right solution and working hard to deliver it.