Lawyers have much to lose in Clarke's bill, and it's only when Tories' interests are involved that their sense of injustice twitches
The first thing we do, let's kill all lawyers", says a Jack Cade rebel in Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 2. It always gets a laugh and a whoop or two. Kenneth Clarke, secretary of state for justice, knows his audience too: few hearts bleed at cutting lawyers' fees. Naturally he blurs the difference between fat cat barristers earning fortunes from legal aid in high-profile criminal cases, whose fees he leaves untouched – and the work of social conscience lawyers, whose fees he is abolishing completely. Public interest lawyers earn very little in law centres and Citizens Advice bureaus, helping people lost in the legal wilderness of welfare, tenancies or working rights. As a result, law centres and CABs will close.
Yesterday a visitor to Westminster could observe the double whammy. Down one end of the corridor the Commons debated some of the harshest parts of the welfare reform bill. A Labour debate highlighted the under-publicised savagery of tax credit cuts that next month take between £3,000 and £4,000 away from low-earning families who can't get their working time up to 24 hours a week. Hundreds of thousands of people and 470,000 children still have no idea of the devastating income cut about to hit them on 6 April.
Meanwhile, down the other end of the corridor, the Lords debated the legal aid bill which removes all legal support that ensures people at least get the benefits they are entitled to. Legal aid is abolished for "social" cases, even if people risk losing their homes and livelihoods, even if the Department for Work and Pensions blunders kick away crutches or leave cancer patients in the lurch. Maladministration sees 40% of appeals against disability benefit removal overturned, but there will be no legal help for any claimants' redress. Employers need worry less about regulations, now that their employees can get no legal aid to challenge unfair dismissal or harassment. Though evictions by private landlords have risen by 17%, the bill abolishes legal aid for tenants.
Public attention may not fix on legal aid, but when asked in a poll for the Legal Action Group, 80% said those with low incomes should get free legal support. The government admits 600,000 people now using legal advice every year will lose access to it. In the Lords yesterday the most magisterial of silks and wigs attacked the £350m cut that stops the humblest using the law: Clarke will find the august Lord Woolf, Lady Butler-Sloss, Lord Pannick, Lady Scotland and many other big legal brains fiercely robust opponents.
Fewer victims of domestic violence will bring their abusers to court when a far tougher measure of "objective evidence" means half the cases will never be heard. Half the victims at present on legal aid will no longer qualify, when medical evidence from A&E, GPs or a women's refuge will not be enough. There will be no legal aid even in child custody battles between couples. A father may have the funds to hire a good lawyer, but the mother will be left to represent herself in court over children and money. This comes at the same time that mothers will have to pay to use the child support agency, and be charged at least 12% on any money collected. The government says couples must "sort things out for themselves" or seek mediation. But with no threat of court, why should fathers pay? Maintenance becomes voluntary. Sometimes I find I have to pinch myself to believe these things are really happening.
But what stirs a sense of injustice among restless Tory backbenchers is none of these – which they heartily support. They are exercised over cutting child benefit for higher earning families. Here is an unfairness they understand because it's happening to their people. George Osborne is scurrying to patch up an error that sees two earners on £40,000 keep child benefit while a couple with one earner on £44,000 and a stay-at-home mother loses the lot. Anyone whose pay rises £1 above the £43,875 higher tax rate also loses all £1,700 a year for two children.
The word is that the chancellor could ease the pain by not cutting child benefit until families earn £50,000. That doesn't change the essential unfairness. Is this politically dangerous? Beyond angry backbenchers, probably not. Where else will those better-off voters go? Rarely towards Labour. Families on £43,000 may not feel well off, but they aren't the squeezed middle, either: they are in the top 8.2% of earners, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. The median income for a couple with two children is £30,066.
That shows how the Tory sense of injustice doesn't start to twitch until it reaches the upper echelons, even more so over their hatred of the 50p tax band. Listen to them protest how unfair a mansion tax would be on homes worth more than £2m: older people with ordinary incomes living in extraordinarily valuable properties should not be made to pay up, move out or downsize. Yet in the same breath they pass the welfare reform bill that forces out poor social tenants from their family homes if they have just one spare bedroom.
A curious and apparently quite fierce argument broke out in the cabinet's home affairs committee over the chancellor's plan to triple the minimum price of cheap booze to about 50p a unit: cheapest cider would rise to £4 per 2-litre bottle to deter the bingeing that costs the NHS dear.
Suddenly all those ministers who raised not a murmur against the tax credit cuts that shrink incomes of £17,000 to £13,000 overnight became deeply concerned at the injustice of "penalising the poor". Michael Gove, Andrew Lansley and Nick Clegg saw this as a nanny-state assault on individual liberty. Maybe they feel the drinks industry pressure; maybe they are wary of a drink tax due to come in just before the 2015 election? But how perverse to be more concerned with libertarian dogma than with crippling cuts to family incomes or abolition of poor people's right to the law if unjustly sacked, evicted or denied a benefit.
The welfare reform bill has passed and the NHS bill will too, now Shirley Williams has folded. But the silks on the red benches may yet give the legal aid bill the bloodiest nose of the three. This is a crude and cruel way to save legal costs, since most legal aid goes on large fees to lawyers in a few cases, while least is spent defending the rights of the desperate. Radical reform would upend the extravagance of court practices and rewards. But Kenneth Clarke QC, as with other ministers and their bills, finds it more congenial to swing the axe not against the rich and powerful, but against those who will make least noise.
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