Legal squabbles
Sir: Harry Mount’s angry and unfocused polemic (‘Against the Law’, 8 June), demonstrates a fundamental ignorance of the British legal system. That is surprising from a former barrister, even if he never practised after pupillage. British justice is revered worldwide, and for good reason. Rather than deal with the disastrous effects the proposals will have, should they be implemented, Mount’s invective is preoccupied with what barristers wear, rather than what we say. Barristers prefer to focus on evidence.
What could be a bigger display of Big Government than the state charging you with a criminal offence and then allocating you a lawyer, whether or not they are suitable? That is what the legal profession is fighting. To add insult to injury, these lawyers will be allocated on price alone. Quality will be eroded by a Dutch auction style system of bidding for legal aid contacts: price competitive tendering.
Legal services are not exempt from cuts in a time of economic austerity. But what masquerades as cuts will result in far more appeals, court delays, miscarriages of justice, and an increasing number of vulnerable people having to represent themselves in court, all of which will end up costing the taxpayer far more.
If Harry Mount is happy to be represented by a trucking company should he be arrested for Bullingdon high-jinks, then that is a matter for him, but most people wouldn’t be. Of course, the likelihood of Mr Mount relying on a legal aid lawyer is nil. A recent poll found that 68 per cent of the British public agree that at less than 0.5 per cent of annual government spending, legal aid is a worthwhile investment in our basic freedoms. But why let the facts get in the way of a good argument?
Maura McGowan QC
Chairman of the Bar Council
London WC1
Sir: I had hoped for better from Harry Mount than his ill-informed populist diatribe. To exclude only banking, trusts and intellectual property before labelling all other areas of work undertaken by the Bar as being ‘child’s play’ is almost as daft as his apparent failure to recognise the obvious problems inherent in ‘one-size-fits-all’ electronic alternatives to consulting the Bar (or any other kind of lawyers).
Plenty of evidence to consider (at no charge, I might add) — and by which to suggest a lucky escape for our profession as a whole when Harry Mount left it. It is said that everyone hates lawyers until they need one. No one, it seems, hates lawyers as much as a failed one.
Tim Prudhoe
By email
Sir: It was a delight to read Harry Mount’s dismemberment of our legal profession. The only mistake that I could see was that Dick the Butcher was in Henry VI (rather than Henry IV) Part 2.
Ian Baird
Framlingham, Suffolk
We’re not mad
Sir: I read with disbelief Matthew Parris’s piece (‘Why Ukip is a party of extremists’, 1 June). Ukip has two defining policies: first, a UK withdrawal from the European Union; second, an end to the UK’s open and porous borders. The first policy has the support of 45-55 per cent of the UK electorate, the second is supported by 60-70 per cent of the UK electorate. Mr Parris is in effect calling Ukip mad — and along with them, the majority of his fellow citizens. But there is another important point. Gratuitous abuse used to be, and generally still is, wholly unacceptable in political discourse and public life. No longer. The politically correct establishment and their hangers-on in the media deem themselves exempt. It is this ‘prism’ that fair-minded people should have absolutely nothing to do with. Meantime, Ukip will put forward our case calmly and politely without one scintilla of abuse.
William Dartmouth, MEP (Ukip)
Whiteway, Devon
No support for violence
Sir: Lewis Jones (Books, 8 June) is entitled to state his opinion that my book about Bono is ‘often badly written’, though he never offers evidence to support that view, and indeed he quotes some of my nicer phrases without clearly attributing them to me. But he is really not entitled to state as though it were fact, also without evidence, that I am ‘pro-IRA’. As I write in The Frontman, ‘Most people genuinely abhorred the violence of the IRA.’ I was and am one of those people. Although I have long tried to understand the roots of violence, during the Troubles I considered myself a pacifist. Both as an activist and as an author, I have never given support to violence, whether by state or non-state actors, as a means to political ends. That is more than most Spectator writers can say.
Harry Browne
Dublin
The first red line
Sir: Dot Wordsworth’s musings (Mind Your Language, 8 June) on the derivation of the term ‘crossing a red line’ used by President Obama in relation to Syria ignores the most obvious origin of the phrase: that of the Red Line agreement of July 1928, which indicated the area in the Middle East within which signatories would co-operate with each other in the search for oil. It was so-called for the simple reason that the designated region was marked out by a line drawn with a red pencil on a map.
Mark Davies
London SW13
Confused Yorkshiremen
Sir: For us Yorkshiremen already hopelessly confused about our social status, do you realise how unhelpful it is when Tanya Gold (Food, 1 June), offers the pronunciation advice: ‘Mass (rhymes with ‘class’)’?
John Foster
Tadcaster, North Yorkshire
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