The disclosure was a ticking bomb ready to explode. For years lawyers campaigning against legal aid cuts were advised by sympathetic reporters that they needed real examples about real people. Whilst we all had clients who could say that their fates would have been different ‘without legal aid’ only a handful were willing to relive their experiences publicly.
Leroy Skeete, Raphael Rowe and others spoke at various rallies. The Justice Alliance used a selection of talking heads for the excellent “I am for justice” campaign. This symptom of our rotten crumbling justice system did not manage to resonate. The Ministry of Justice was able to end each article with the mantra about the generosity of our legal aid system and thus the concerns of the public who were not related to lawyers or defendants were satisfied. It was a public argument that has been very hard to win although the Bach commission with the late Sir Henry Brooke as its vice chair began to make some progress in raising the alarm over the post LASPO-landscape.
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