I posted this thread on Twitter this morning:
I am fed up with Tory attacks on lawyers who defend people against injustice, discrimination, abuse and deportation using the laws parliament has created when they say nothing about those right-wing lawyers who spend their time attacking almost everything of value. A thread…
This cover from The Mail today is typical of the attacks on lawyers. In this case, lawyers wanting enough pay to do the job society asks of them is enough reason to attack them. It's appalling that day in, day out, being a decent lawyer involves abuse from the state and media.
I find this totally objectionable. Maybe that's because I am woke. I am aware of injustice. I think the law should prevent it. I am delighted that for so long parliament shared that view and put laws in place to protect people and that there are lawyers who will take these cases.
There are, however, lawyers who do deserve criticism. Mysteriously I never hear the Tories talk about them. Nor do I notice The Mail doing so.
Let's start with a group I have long thought objectionable. They are the City lawyers, earning a fortune, who design tax abuse schemes with the aim of making the rich richer at cost to society at large. Why do we tolerate them still?
Then there is the small army of lawyers in tax havens, whose only reason to exist is to undermine the democratically approved laws of countries like the UK. Why do we still tolerate their persistent assault on democracy?
After them are the corporate lawyers who queue up to threaten legal action against the state if a government now proposes any form of action to protect society that might reduce their client's profits. Why do we tolerate this fundamentally anti-social behaviour?
Also in the legal sin-bin are those lawyers who make it their job to write unfair contracts that impose harsh penalties and charges on those who might fall foul of a commercial arrangement. They know they are stacking the odds against those who can't understand the small print.
And I will never understand the lawyer who works for the landlord who evicts tenants with consideration of that tenant's real circumstances.
Or, come to that, the lawyer who plies a trade in strike-breaking, or imposing other penalties and conditions on workers already at breaking point.
These are the lawyers whose actions need to be questioned. They are the ones who pursue profit without consideration of ethics and who seek to impose the law without taking into due consideration the injustice that can arise from doing so.
In some cases they are quite literally in my opinion the enemies of the state.
But these lawyers are those who the Tories apparently think are going about their rightful business without further comment being required when what they are actually doing is seeking to find ways to use the law as a means to oppress people.
I may be woke. So too are the lawyers the Tories hate. But the Tories are not asleep. They know that there is abuse within society undertaken by lawyers, day in and day out, and they don't just tolerate it; they quietly applaud it.
That's what I hate, because their tolerance of this abuse is at the heart of their system of injustice. I don't and never have tolerated this injustice.
We have a choice. We can support lawyers who support justice: the woke ones, that is. Or we can support lawyers who promote injustice. Our government supports the wrong ones. It's our job to support justice in that case.
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And Sunak has attacked Jolyon Maugham. Another box ticked on the route to fascism.
https://goodlawproject.org/news/public-enemy-number-one/
Agreed
As others have pointed out, Lawyers apply or use The Law as it is laid down, clearly the Government could change the law but choses not to do so.
Its simply lazy politics.
I think you are underestimating the scale of the problem.
Firstly, nearly all the cases mentioned above are examples where lawyers who are much more heavily funded than those charged with operating the legal system have clearly defeated the intention of the law.
Secondly, for the last forty years the Tories have very deliberately undermined the law directly by drastically underfunding all the organisations we depend upon to enforce it.
In such a situation new laws simply provide opportunities for more abuse.
It may be an idealistic dream but a reforming government would need to pass new laws that systematically attack international tax abuse, tax abusers and those that enable them, then rebuild and fund the enforcement agencies so that the intentions of the new laws were fully and effectively implemented.
These are the sort of policies I assumed would be taken up by a Corbyn govt. Was I wrong?
The Daily Mail headline is pure fascism. They should be banned and the whole lot pulped. And that includes the sick swine who write and sign off shite like this.
A lot of these lawyers earn good money from doing no good. My housing law lecturer who was a barrister told me that there was no money to be made in housing and tenant law. It’s the same with the accountants who are paid to be naughty – see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Just do evil. Oh – and here’s your cut.
On the subject of ‘woke’ however I take issue.
Can someone tell me where the term comes from? Is it an elective term from those who see themselves as well informed and sensitive towards truth?
Or is it a term foisted on those of us (ignorant, dogmatic, er…thick) who’d rather we were not?
In the West we love to create categories, taxonomies etc., to describe the differences we see in things and exploit them. It’s OK to define things when describing rocks and categories of living things, but it gets less useful and potentially more harmful when we apply it to what we think is going on in people’s heads. Using terms like ‘woke’ is going too far and inviting strife and division.
Either way, I will not be defined by it. I refuse it. I was this before they even used this term, before it was invented.
Woke? Bollocks! I am ME and always will be.
It’s just a word PSR!
PSR is right..why do people have to fly under a particular banner? Nothing is ever so binary so why make it so?
Because it might help?
I agree with you, PSR. Woke is the past tense of wake. I woke (up) is in the past. I am politically and socially (etc) awake NOW, not just in the past, and I intend to stay awake to such issues in the future. I think language is important, is vital, to clear and rational thought, and caring about it is a way of staying alert to the misinformation and disinformation and downright dishonesty with which we are bombarded. (Woke has a fairly long, and interesting history, but I admit I only became aware of it a few years ago: I can’t get used to it. It jars in my brain like a wasp in a bottle.)
The word “woke” derives from African-American English, and simply means “(to be) aware”.
Its antonym is the word “ignorant or unaware”.
It has regularly been used over here by right wing commentators and politicians, who have sprayed it around in large measure, as part of their meaningless, distracting culture wars. The previous Tory chairman, Oliver Dowden, was a particularly egregious example, the word often being the only thing of substantial meaning to be found in his articles and speeches, or “rantings”, to be strictly accurate.
I love to remind my right wing acquaintances of this. They find the choice of being aware or remaining ignorant a particular choking point !
Woke is a word adopted in (iirc) the 1920s by African Americans to describe those who understood how systemic racism worked and was used to prevent social advancement of certain minorities.
In a country structured by class (as well as racism) and prejudice against all sorts of sub-groups, deliberately targeted by the Establishment (politicians, media, etc) to distract from the things they’re doing to destroy this society, it’s important to be so much more aware, to not be distracted!
It was first used I believe by African Americans fighting discrimination and prejudice. That it is now a term of abuse by the right is outrageous
I speak from personal experience though where law or regulations have a particular policy intention but dont do it.
If the legislation was written properly in the first place however, job done.
Might be worth looking at some of the immediate post war finance acts and some of the anti abuse provisions contained in them.
All words are just words in the right hands.
All words can be weapons in the wrong hands.
I understand that “woke” was a term used by black slaves for those who were aware and prepared to act against the injustice that was oppressing them.
Now applied to awareness of discrimination and injustice more widely
Thanks, Richard, I should have included the discrimination and social injustice to me comment above.
For that omission I apologize to you and my fellow interlocutors.
This is the big one. You wrote “the corporate lawyers who queue up to threaten legal action against the state if a government now proposes any form of action to protect society that might reduce their client’s profits.”
These people have had a terrible effect on country after country. For example, decades ago now, Egypt was threatened with punitive fines if the government introduced minimum wage legislation which ‘might’ have damaged ‘future profits’ of a foreign investor
In June, dozens of climate scientists signed a letter to President Macron, President of the European Council, the President of the European Commission and Heads of States and Governments.
The letter related to the IPCC climate mitigation report findings related to the Energy Charter Treaty, https://endfossilprotection.org/sites/default/files/2022-06/2022-06-21%20Letter%20from%20climate%20scientists%20to%20EU%20leaders.pdf
One paragraph of this document reads: “A large number of bilateral and multilateral agreements, including the 1994 Energy Charter Treaty, include provisions for using a system of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) designed to protect the interests of investors in energy projects from national policies that could lead their assets to be stranded. Numerous scholars have pointed to ISDS being able to be used by fossil-fuel companies to block national legislation aimed at phasing out the use of their assets”
IPCC, 2022, Chapter 14 on international collaboration, Lines 9 to 14, page 81
The entire world ecosystem is suffering because of the past actions and current threats by these lawyers. Future generations will endure dreadful privations – as will the families of some of these lawyers.
Do lawyers deserve their reputation for intelligence?
Intelligence and wisdom need not conincide
There will be more on this as today progresses
Lawyers (should) apply the law. The fact that some do so with little regard to ethics is unfortunate and that is the fault of those specific lawyers. But they could not do so without the law being in existence. It is the laws that permit these unethical practices that need sorting out.
We tend to discuss these matters as if the entire legal system – in either/both England and Scotland was not fundamentally flawed in the first place. But it is/they are.
Just what part of clause 40 of Magna Carta is met by systems which are not equally available to any and all citizens on grounds of cost? And worse, which cannot be manipulated by the deliberate stressing of citizens to the point of surrender of their rights to justice, by the piling on of costs/threat of financial penalties. Let’s quote it.
“To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny, or delay right or justice.” The ‘selling’ of justice is excactly what both systems are guilty of supporting – and will go on doing so until a NLS – a National Legal Service – replaces the private, and therefore wealth manipulated, legal system.
Having said that – of course the present strikes are a necessary reaction to the Tory party’s attempts in government to make a grossly unfair system even more unfair and inequitable. But it really is only fighting to find a plug – while storm waves are crashing over the side!
David Byrne says.
Many people in the UK are priced out of being able to obtain justice and criminal offences are ritually ignored by the police. The system is broken.
Why does the machinery of justice for example, totally ignore the criminal actions of Water Company Executives who believe that they have a right to pollute our oceans and waterways without sanction.
Their actions endanger the environment and put lives at risk.
Those responsible (the controlling minds) need to be prosecuted and jailed, and I am not pointing to the men in blue boiler suits holding the spanners.
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