There is a lot of negative chatter on social media aimed at those barristers who have decided to strike. A lot of this chatter concerns misapprehensions that members of the criminal bar are fat cats acting as parasites on both the nation and the economy.
This is not a view that I share. Having had course in my much earlier life to have need to consult with a barrister and my experience working in courts, I came away with the impression that the criminal bar performs a vital function in our society. Everyone, even those charged with the most horrific and inexplicable crimes, deserve a defence. If defence counsel was not available to defendants then it’s quite likely that we would devolve to the time when only those charged with high treason were allowed defence counsel and a massive number of unjust trials would result.
Legally aided members of the criminal bar are not massively overpaid, a lot of them could earn the same or slightly more doing some other sort of job. I’ve heard that there are junior barristers who are surviving on not much more than minimum wage and for carrying out work that should have the respect of us all and far more money.
There’s a brilliant piece over at Unherd which puts the other side to the story of the Barrister’s strike in which a member of the criminal bar sets out many of those aspects of how the bar works that make the justice system work. The fact for example that because barrister’s are independent of the state and that it is this independence that breeds trust and ethical behaviour.
The author, Adam King, said:
Independence creates responsibility, and personal jeopardy. These then give rise, over time, to the good sort of institutional pride, and so to exactly the kind of “strong culture of ethics” noisily boasted of by organisations where it is so obviously absent.
This is a damned good point. By being independent barrister’s need to build a reputation for both effectiveness and honesty in order to both survive and thrive and I do wonder whether the situation would be much much worse if we had defence counsel directly employed by the State rather than being at one remove from it?
It’s easy for those who have never been wrongly accused of something or who have the financial resources that would allow them to employ counsel directly to say ‘cut legal aid’ or ‘the barristers are fat cats’. But it’s also very easy for those same people to forget that one day they might be poor or one day they might encounter one of Britain’s increasingly bent and politicised police officers and need the services of a legally aided barrister.
Yes, you seem to be saying it’s OK for middle class lawyers to strike but not railway workers in the RMT?
Some of the railway workers are getting rises that are so low that they represent a pay cut. I don’t doubt for one minute that working on the railways is a good job but it can involve unsocial hours and should be recompensed accordingly. I can understand the anger that people feel about having their journeys disrupted and I have sympathy there as well.
Barristers and railway workers are living under a delusion.
Their employers give them their wages, but the money from which those wages are paid comes from the consumer/taxpayer.
Recompense must be a function of what the “customer” can afford to pay, and is willing to pay.
If that results in a pay cut, tough. that’s just the way the system needs to work.
Some workers claim that they should be paid more from the company profits. But that money comes from the customers and they should have first call any any excess profits. Not from the unions who are trying to mug society,
TBF, this is the way most people in the UK think after decades of getting things they have not paid for.
PS, I didn’t create this world with its unfairness. G-d did.
Or so, the Judechrislamites want me to believe.
The problem is that there are a lot of people who have been on sub inflation rate pay rises for years. I can understand anger here. If you work in a safety critical job or you have studied scrimped and saved to be in a position where you are called to the bar but then face fees that are decreasing in value then should there not be some remedying of this situation? I’d much rather pay a junior barrister or a signalman a decent wage as the signalman keeps me safe on the railways and many of us have had the need of a barrister at some point in our lives. We rely on the skills of both.
Looking at the chaos that passes for our justice system it’s a minor miracle that anyone is prepared to do the barristers job. Cases can be postponed time after time and in a recent report I saw the case was abandoned after the barristers had done over 100 hours of work on it. The barrister said his pay for that case came to just over 3 pounds an hour.
Off topic as it has not been raised yet but attempting to find some figures it appears that the youth unemployment rate in the UK is currently around 10.8%. That is a sizeable number of young people, and we should maybe be focussing on their plight as a whole as opposed to the small proportion of them who are trans?
According to the House of Commons Library a report into current youth unemployment said: “The unemployment rate (the proportion of the economically active population who are unemployed) for 16-24 year olds was 10.8% in February-April 2022. This is down from 11.2% in the previous quarter and down from 13.5% a year before. It is down from 12.3% pre-pandemic.
The inactivity rate for young people is 38.3%, down from 39.2% in the previous quarter. 77% of the young people who are economically inactive are in full-time education”
My immediate takeaways from this is that in general even with the stresses of the pandemic or rather the Government’s response to it, youth unemployment is on a downward trajectory. Also that the large numbers of young people in education might be hiding either joblessness or unemployability because of poor education.
It’s not in societies long term interest for there to be lots of unemployed young men which is why I believe that we need to reindustrialise in order to absorb more of these young people who might not be of university calibre and protect ourselves from being beholden to nations that are potential enemies.
But Marian, obsessing with the TransCrap & condemning the unemployed and sorry to say post-uni unemployables to a life of indebtedness with a crap “degree” or the failure to provide vocational training or even a work-ethic to our youth, Labour is guaranteed a fertile self-entitled voter base.