Legal Aid, Kathy Lette, Foreign Journalists on the UK.

 Legal Aid

Justice, James Thornhill (1675/76-1734) 
Photo Credit: City of London Corporation [CC BY-NC]

Scotland Yard and other state bodies spent almost half a million pounds in public money on lawyers at the Westminster terrorist attack inquest while victims’ families were denied legal aid.

The inquest was into the deaths of an unarmed police officer and four pedestrians on Westminster Bridge in March 17. The pedestrians were struck by Khalid Masood in a van and he then stabbed the officer to death outside the Houses of Parliament.

…Now the sisters of PC Keith Palmer, the murdered policeman, have expressed their “utter shock and disbelief” that the state agencies involved spent almost half a million pounds in taxpayer money on legal fees.

“It sends a clear message that the victims’ families’ quests for answers into the deaths of their loved ones is just not important. Protecting the establishment is far more important,” they told The Times.

Calling for immediate reform of the legal aid system, they said that their lack of funding “had a major impact on our case, as we were not able to call experts during the inquest, which would have saved time and money. It would also have highlighted the systemic failures sooner.”

(The Times, 2019)

The Criminal Justice System

On the day a parliamentary report published in May 2016 began with those nine damning words – the criminal justice system is close to breaking point – not one single newspaper thought it more newsworthy than repetitive scare stories about migration or, in one case, a confected ‘scandal’ over Britain’s Got talent.

When Karl Turner MP tabled a parliamentary debate on the parlous underfunding of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in January 2017, his litany of sobbing CPS staff and collapsing prosecutions – the things that we in the courts see every day – was attended by a meagre handful of MPs, and met by a virtual media blackout. When the courts upheld government initiatives to deprive the wrongly accused of their legal fees, there was no clamour. Just deafening silence.

If the criminal justice system were the NHS, it would never be off the front pages.

(The Secret Barrister, page 14)

People

Kathy Lette, our favourite Australian …has become a cougar at 60. No man with chiselled pecs is safe from the novelist’s lustful pounces, she says…

“My skirts have got shorter and my neckline has got lower. I’m now the reverse of an iceberg: 90 per cent of me is visible.”

She has spent the winter dancing in night clubs. “My sisters say I’m starting to look as though I just crawled out from under a stone,” she adds. “Probably Keith.”

(The Times, 2019)

Two foreign Journalists, one German, the other Italian, report on their views of the UK.

…It is a privilege and a challenge to be the UK correspondent for a German newspaper. Our readers back home are incredibly knowledgeable about this place. They speak the language, read British news online, travel to every corner of these islands. They watch BBC shows, attend British universities. By now they all know Mister “Order! Ordeeeer!” John Bercow, too.

(Stefanie Bolzen, Die Welt.)

Street Life in Rome (The Letter Writer), 

Keeley Halswelle (1832-1891) 

Photo Credit: City of London Corporation [CC BY-NC]

This is the latest absurd paradox…that as Italian and European readers are becoming rather fond of the glorious House of Commons and of the British Parliament’s theatricality, the British seem increasingly unhappy with it. And yet, now more than ever, Britons should be proud of their parliament and the mess it has unleashed. Because its political debates are authentic, intense and passionate…and because in other countries, the parliament does not have the same character or importance; in Italy, for example, there have been brawls, and debates are quashed with votes of confidence; in France the parliament comes a strict second to the Elysee; and in Germany there is not the same emotion.

Two weeks ago, I had the privilege of interviewing John Bercow at Westminster. Today the Speaker is an idol in Europe for his bellowed rhetoric that blends Shakespeare and Monty Python. Despite the Munchian zeitgeist (never has an exhibition seemed so timely as the British Museum’s this April), British politics is ever more appreciated abroad; Mr Speaker explained to me why – it is because here, the parliament is the soul of everything.

(Antonello Guerrera, La Repubblica)

(The Observer, 2019)