Jack Straw is an idiot

I once had the opportunity to stick a leg out and trip up Jack Straw as he, clad in sweaty vest and shiny shorts, and his close protection officers jogged past over Westminster bridge. It is a missed chance that I regret, if not daily then more and more often. Today being a case in point.

In an apparent attempt at rabble rousing, fearless Jack announced to the Labour conference that:

I am concerned about ‘no win, no fee’ arrangements, it’s claimed they have provided greater access to justice but the behaviour of some lawyers in ramping up their fees in these cases is nothing short of scandalous.

That would be why your extremely recent review of CFAs made no significant changes, eh Jack?

Then Spring-heeled Jack went on:

There are now three times as many lawyers in private practice but paid for by the taxpayer as there were three decades ago; the budget has grown faster than the health and education services. The challenge now is how better to spend these huge sums in the interests of justice; something I want to do with the legal profession and local government.

Oh, no, Jack, not those blood sucking legal aid lawyer leeches again. Firstly, I doubt these figures. Come on, show us the figures for private practice solicitors ‘paid for’ (paid a bit, wholly, or what?) by the tax payer over the last three decades to support this claim.

Secondly, if Jack is right about these teeming hordes of legal aid lawyers, one has to ask which way are they more likely to vote? My guess is that legal aid lawyers would tend to be labour voters. So at exactly the moment when labour needs every vote it can get, Jack choses to have a go at a professional group of labour voters. Just a stroke of brilliance.

Given that labour policy has generated a huge new demand for legal aid lawyers, what with just about everything being a serious criminal offence nowadays, Jack appears to lack the new labour understanding that they don’t do supply side economics these days, it is all about internal markets.

Labour criminal policy and criminal legal aid are a near perfect model of the symbiosis of public delivery and private practice, such that the NHS should be taking notes. But that means dancing to the provider’s tune, as any NHS manager will tell you. Of course, if you want very publicly adjourned trials, Jack…

Housing Minister underpants dance

Something tells me that Labour in Australia hasn’t quite got the hang of the po-faced morality of New Labour here. But even there, it appears that a housing minister dancing drunkenly in his underpants (or to be pedantic, only in his underpants) to loud techno music on a green Chesterfield sofa and simulating sex on an MP is cause for a resignation.

Matt Brown was a police minister for New South Wales, but before that, he was Housing Minister. In case you are curious, here he is:

Chesterfield sofa sex fiend

Mr Brown, during his energetic and all too fleshy display, apparently “mounted the chest” of Wollongong MP Noreen Hay and called out to Ms Hay’s adult daughter “Look at this, I’m tittie-fucking your mother!” Mr Brown disputes shouting anything about tittie fucking, but admits the rest, including the distasteful colour of the Chesterfield.

Naturally, before entering politics, Mr Brown was a solicitor.

Caroline Flint, you have a lot to live up to.

Bad times

Looking around at the glum and tense faces on my commute through the City, as jobs evaproate and hedge funds short sell every major financial institution going, the legal aid litigator has not a little sense of Schadenfreude. I love a good crisis.

So, in solidarity with newly jobless bankers….

Bad Times Just Around the Corner