Back in 1999, I wrote the Letter of the Week in the New Statesman magazine. This was what you did in the days before Twitter! I was responding to the Labour Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine’s proposed cuts to Legal Aid. The attacks on legal aid lawyers were relentless.
That was the start of the falling dominos that has led us to the legal aid waste land that we have today. Who would have thought back then, that we would end up with some areas having little or no legal aid lawyers in certain key areas of work such as housing?
Lord Falconer, a close friend and ally of Tony Blair was a key player at that time. He has recently expressed regret for creating the belief that legal aid lawyers ‘had their noses in the trough’.
This is a welcome change of heart. But it is a little bit like Henry VIII saying he wished he had tried conciliation with Anne Boleyn!
At first many of us here hostile to the idea of lawyers working for nothing or supporting legal charities. What we really needed was a properly funded legal aid scheme. But we faced a dilemma. How could we leave people who were threated with losing their homes or livelihoods, to fend for themselves? Lawyers had to support agencies providing free advice whilst also campaigning for legal aid.
All of which leads me to the Liverpool Legal Walk on 11th June. This will the 8th walk when a couple of hundred lawyers and others who work in the legal sector will take to the streets of Liverpool. We do this to make a statement about access to justice and to raise funds for providers of free advice.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. This is why I have pledged to do the whole 5k walk in a Liverpool FC shirt just days after their much-publicised Champions League win. As a lifelong Everton fan, this is a big deal and something that I swore that I would never do. But I recklessly said that if my sponsorship went over £500 I would face the ultimate humiliation in the name of access to justice. We crossed that line today and I am now doomed! But it will be worth it if one person gets access to legal help that would otherwise be out of their reach.
You can still donate to the cause at –