"Why would I support legal aid? I'm never going to need it."

[major_clanger]

Apparently this is a common response to concerns about the Ministry of Justice's cuts to legal aid. At the One Bar, One Voice event yesterday one of the speakers gave a good example of its importance to people who think they're never likely to get into trouble

Comments

[history_monk]

Assuming you can never get in trouble is either ludicrous self-deception, or a strong confidence that you're of a class that the police will treat as being axiomatically in the right. Which is stupid, there's always someone more important, and the police usually do the job honestly.

[purplecthulhu]

Of course members of the Cabinet wouldn't ever be hassled by or conspired against by the police. That would never happen.

[history_monk]

Of course not, and neither would the police ignore law-breaking by an influential media organisation, or come up with stretched interpretations of the law to defend it.

[matrixmann]

Speeches like this only come from people who can be sure they can afford it.
But anyway, they're going to cut off what they want to cut off. If they say "we have no money for that", then they have no money for that.

It doesn't matter what it is.
If they consider having money for something unnecessary, then they get even the unnecessary.

[del_c]

I, too, thought you were leading up to a story where someone turned out to need legal aid money, but it ended up being a story where someone needed legal advice. I can't imagine Rupert Murdoch or, to take the example above, a cabinet minister, claiming they'll never need legal advice.

There are people who say they're never going to need the money, and often they're even right, but they're still morally wrong about that meaning that scrapping legal aid assistance funds is okay.

[major_clanger]

Well, legal aid doesn't work by HMG writing you a cheque. Rather, a lawyer is authorised to work for you on the basis of being paid later by the Legal Aid Agency.

What happened here is that Mrs X had the free services of a lawyer who was available to advise her because of the availability of criminal legal aid. As it is cut back, we are seeing more and more cases of small local law firms not doing such work, because it is uneconomical for them.

Yes, Mrs X was always in the position of being able to phone up a lawyer and promise to pay for advice. But would she have done that? Or, with an apparently reasonable proposal from the police, would she have accepted the caution instead?

[a_cubed]

Typical lazy policing. DOn't bother to actually investigte. Just see if someone will "confess" i.e. accept a caution.
Is it just me or does the fact that we use the term "caution" in respect to two completely different police interactions with the public ("Miranda" rightsas they're called in the US and a sumary conviction by a police office) part of the problem here. Being aware of the "summar conviction" variant I was confused and very worried when giving evidence to a police officer "under caution" a few years ago when he said he'd "have to caution me before I made a statement".

[cmcmck]

We're probably comfortably enough off never to be going to need legal aid, but your story reminds me how little people in my personal circumstances can ever trust our friends the plod! :o/