It is rare these days that anything causes me to choke on my morning coffee! After the year that we have had there is not much left to shock. But this did happen this morning as I was briefly looking through my Twitter feed before starting work. The culprit (!) was a tweet from https://nearlylegal.co.uk/blog/which shared a shocking post from the UK Home Office – My first reaction was to check that it was…

  Most of the time they are harmless and sometimes even funny. I remember the first time that I heard a good lawyer insult. I was newly qualified and out on the town with other members of the Liverpool Young Solicitors Group Committee. Yes, there was a distant time when I was eligible! The conversation moved on to public perception of lawyers and someone commented that he had heard someone say that solicitors were like…

I still remember the sense of horror in 2015 as I followed the news reports of three young, and very vulnerable looking, schoolgirls heading to Syria to join ISIS. I wasn’t the only one who hoped and prayed that something would happen to stop them. It was only ever going to end very badly. Five years on; one is certainly dead, one is missing presumed dead and one has become the most hated person in…

I am currently reading The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment by Amelia Gentleman. You don’t need me to tell you that this was one of the greatest scandals of the last 50 years. Ordinary working people who had been in the UK for 40 – 50 years suddenly and inexplicably found themselves in the middle of a nightmare. They were caretakers, ambulance drivers, cleaners, teachers, care workers, nurses. They were parents, grandparents and friends…

The words law and justice are normally inseparable. The aim of a legal system is to promote justice. The most familiar image that is associated with our legal system is one of scales of justice. This is, or rather should be, a statement of the obvious. It seems however that costs savings now trump justice in some cases. This is the disturbing outcome of the recent judgment in A v B which was recently reported…

One thing that will never be the same after the current lockdown, is my appreciation of nature and the outdoors. I have had an interest in wildlife and nature for a while, especially as my photography skills have grown. But, a bit like work, it has been something that I ‘go to’. So, we travelled across the Atlantic to see sloths in Costa Rica or to the Red Sea to experience Picasso fish. What lockdown…