It suits this Government to boast that our citizenry has easy access to free or low cost legal advice.  Unfortunately, it does not want to pay for it.  However, rather than adopting the honest course of explaining that because of budget constraints it is either legal aid or the NHS (or defence, or education) the Government always seeks to blame greedy lawyers for the expense of the legal aid scheme.  Legal aid practitioners undertaking routine family work are paid a little more than a third of the private, high street rate.  Criminal legal aid lawyers are paid a little over a quarter of the going private rate.  The new costs regime being introduced by the Government’s quango, the Legal Services Commission, will result in legal aid practitioners receiving a pay cut.  The propaganda peddled by the Government, to the effect that legal aid lawyers are well paid and will be even more handsomely remunerated by way of the new costs regime, is worthy of Dr Joseph Goebbels.

The comprehensive legal aid system that we have in this country is the envy of the world, but if the Government doesn’t want to pay for it then it should say so and desist from attacking underpaid legal aid practitioners who have been the backbone of the system these past thirty years or more.

Legal aid bill 'highest in world'

“The polls have been volatile this year. Pollsters and political professionals who swore in the spring that Brown's numbers were so ghastly that the best he could hope for was to cling to office and pray David Cameron was run over by Zac Goldsmith driving an eco-friendly hybrid car, now see no possibility other than a walk-over for Brown.”

 

Iain Martin

A surprisingly large number of political analysts, commentators and pundits appear to have forgotten that “a week is a long time in politics”.  They suffer the affliction of a “group-think” mentality, slavishly following the accepted consensus, until very belatedly something snaps them out of it.  I doubt that they know or understand any more than the electorate they seek to convince.

All the more reason not to pay much attention to anything they might say.

Don't panic! How the Tories can survive

Commenting upon developments in the Madeleine McCann case in Saturday’s edition of The Times, Professor David Cantor opines,

“It appears that the Portuguese police may have fallen into the trap of having first formed a view of who the guilty party is, then seeking out the evidence to support it. It is rare for people untrained in science deliberately to attempt to refute their own hypotheses: instead we tend to reinterpret anything that happens to fit in with the notion to which we have become increasingly committed.”

Lest the Portuguese Police take the rap all on their own, in all fairness it should be pointed out that this is a common failing of many Police investigations the world over, including those conducted by our own law enforcement agencies.

Why patterns of the past point to abduction by a stranger as most likely explanation