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Our under-resourced legal aid system is dangerous. It needn’t be this way

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Original article by Frances Timberlake republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Having an under-funded legal aid system can ruin lives | Oli Scarff/Getty Images

Extra £20m of spending should be celebrated, but it pales in comparison to funding for hostile environment policies

Navigating the UK’s Kafkaesque immigration system is incredibly challenging. One ‘wrong’ turn – a delay in an application, an incorrect form – can quite literally risk a person’s life.

This is deliberate; the system is designed to be hostile. If you’re someone with an immigration or asylum problem, you’ll probably need a lawyer for specialist advice. But what happens if you can’t afford one?

In theory, everyone claiming asylum in this country has the right to access legal aid if they can’t afford it themselves – which is the case for most people seeking asylum, who are not allowed to work. In practice, though, decades of chronic underfunding have left the system in crisis and many people without the necessary legal support. This year only 43% of people claiming asylum had access to a legal aid lawyer, down from an estimated 73% in 2020.

Last month, after years of concerted organising by communities and legal workers, we received a glimmer of hope. Justice secretary Shabana Mahmood announced an extra £20m of funding for the civil legal aid system – the first increase since 1996.

While this is to be celebrated, it’s nowhere near enough. To put the figure into perspective, the last government spent £22m on using the Bibby Stockholm barge as asylum accommodation, £318m on the failed Rwanda removals plan and £996m on asylum housing contracts with Clearsprings, a private firm that has been accused of “poor accommodation and lack of care for residents”.

We’ve seen almost 30 years of stagnating salaries for legal workers, legal aid providers shutting down, and more people being forced to face injustices without support. Now, we need to see much bolder action from the new Labour government if we are to get out of the downward spiral that legal aid is in.

How did we get here?

The UK’s legal aid system was created in 1949, on the post-war principle that wherever you are, whatever problems you face and however much money you have, you should be able to have legal advice and representation if you need it.

But while it has never actually been that easy for migrants to access legal aid, the last few years have made it particularly punishing.

In the 2010s, as successive governments’ austerity regimes violently stripped away safety nets for working-class people – migrants and UK citizens alike – legal aid was cut drastically. The appropriately named ‘hostile environment’ policies also meant people whose immigration claims fell through faced losing access to healthcare, housing and jobs.

All of this paved the way for Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak’s governments to house migrants in disused military barracks for years on end and threaten to send them more than 4,000 miles away to Rwanda. At the same time, successive justice secretaries have refused to fund legal aid provision, making it almost impossible for a person to challenge a legal decision that could change their life.

In real terms, at least £950m of legal aid funding has been lost every year since 2012 and many people have lost their right to legal aid altogether as the scope for eligibility has been reduced.

Legal aid workers, meanwhile, have not just had their salaries slashed, but their public value degraded. Immigration lawyers in particular have been demonised, denigrated by ministers and in the press as ‘lefty lawyers’ – leading to them becoming targets of violent hate crimes.

We are now seeing the predictable and painful impacts of this on the people whom we at Migrants Organise, a charity supporting refugees and migrants, work with every day.

A person seeking asylum who doesn’t have access to legal advice is far less likely to be able to put together the evidence and testimony needed to ‘meet’ the Home Office’s stringent burden of proof.

If their case is refused, they’ll face an even more byzantine appeal system and be expected to represent themselves in front of a judge – still without getting any advice on the regulations that they’re expected to meet. But several large immigration firms have also stopped taking on asylum appeal cases because they don’t get paid enough to do so, forcing many people to tackle gruelling and complex immigration procedures without ever speaking to an adviser.

Then if a person is refused again by the court, because they had a poorly prepared application and no one to advise them, they could be detained and deported to a country where their life is in danger.

Mohammed*, an aspiring barrister and a young migrant advocate at the We Belong charity, has experienced this first-hand. “I waited over five years for a decision on my asylum claim, and then my case got refused and my legal representative dropped me because they’d stopped taking appeals,” he explained. “This was a month into my Masters. It took me almost a year to find another legal aid lawyer, and it was only through the support of community organisations who knew good lawyers and could refer me.

“For people who don’t speak English or have the confidence to seek out support, it’s impossible. Now, after having thought I wouldn’t make it to study anything, I’m able to study law and go into the work that I know will help to fix the problems I myself experienced.”

Pushing back

Having an unsupported legal aid system ruins lives – but it does not need to be this way. Experts, lawyers and the communities who need them have increasingly been speaking out and coming together to document and challenge the impacts of not having access to legal aid.

Organisations and legal aid providers from across the country have been working to have their voices heard. Many contributed to a review of civil legal aid that Sunak’s government launched last year to better understand how well the current system works (or, more to the point, doesn’t). And this year, Young Legal Aid Lawyers and Migrants Organise have run a joint campaign to help those most impacted by the legal aid crisis to educate their MPs on it and demand change.

Researchers such as Jo Wilding, the author of The Legal Aid Market, have also shed light on the extent of the crisis and drawn attention to the expanding ‘legal aid deserts’ where no legal aid is available at all. And legal cases have been brought against the government. Most recently, in June this year, Duncan Lewis Solicitors challenged the government’s violation of its duty to ensure legal aid is available as a result of not increasing fees. The case was settled in September on the basis that the new lord chancellor would decide whether to increase rates in November.

This organised pressure has been impossible for the government to ignore. Finally, the new Labour government has taken heed of the decades of evidence shared, and taken a first step towards positive change by committing new funding.

The additional £20m announced last month, which will be spent over the next four years, is intended to “mark the next step in government plans to rebuild the legal aid sector”. The money will be used to increase legal aid fees for those working in the housing and immigration sectors, with the government saying it is aiming for a 10% uplift in hourly rates, to £65 outside London and £69 in the capital.

Though the final figures have yet to be announced, we at Migrants Organise calculate that the proposed payment fees could increase immigration legal aid work by just over 30%. This, we hope, will open up some capacity amongst legal aid providers to take on cases of people who have been waiting without support.

But in the grand scheme of things, this remains a small injection of cash into two severely neglected areas of legal aid, which will struggle to make any significant indent.

A small uplift in fees isn’t enough to make working in legal aid any more attractive, meaning it won’t address the current crisis in the recruitment and retention of legal aid workers. There is also no sign of a commitment to regularly review funding for legal aid, in order to avoid us ending up in the same position we are now after four more years of inflation.

As successive governments have built a profitable industry out of cruelty, money has been syphoned off to private companies at the expense of public services – housing, transport, legal advice – needed to create better futures for our communities. The hostile environment for migrants remains very much alive, with Labour promising more money for immigration detention centres, increased deportations, and terrorism charges brought against those forced to cross the Channel by boat. Many people still face barriers to accessing justice even with the latest announcement – whether due to language issues, misinformation, or delays.

“Yes, we’re fighting to have more legal aid lawyers. But when will the next increase happen?” asked Mohammed. “We need lawyers now that care, especially when the immigration system is so damaging. Quality work, care and compassion should be the core of legal aid. It’s not just about funding, it’s about the ideology and principle.”

So, whilst we’re celebrating the work that went into this change, we’re under no illusion that for people caught up in the hostile environment – or indeed anyone in the UK in need of a lawyer – life is going to get much easier.

In the short term, we need a legal aid system that is better resourced than the government’s current proposal, for funding to be sustained and raised with inflation (like in many other publicly funded services), and for it to be available to all groups of people who need it.

And ultimately, it is only an end to the hostile environment that will prevent people from being forced into precarious situations in the first place and bring about the dignity and justice that we all deserve.

With renewed hope for change, we need to continue organising with all those impacted by the crisis in legal aid to speak out and call for what’s needed.

*Names have been changed

Original article by Frances Timberlake republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Continue ReadingOur under-resourced legal aid system is dangerous. It needn’t be this way

As Peace Protests Are Violently Suppressed, CNN Paints Them as Hate Rallies

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Original article by JULIE HOLLAR republished from FAIR under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

As peace activists occupied common spaces on campuses across the country, some in corporate media very clearly took sides, portraying student protesters as violent, hateful and/or stupid. CNN offered some of the most striking of these characterizations.

CNN‘s Dana Bash (Inside Politics, 5/1/24) blames the peace movement for “destruction, violence and hate on college campuses across the country.” 

Dana Bash (Inside Politics, 5/1/24) stared gravely into the camera and launched into a segment on “destruction, violence and hate on college campuses across the country.” Her voice dripping with hostility toward the protests, she reported:

Many of these protests started peacefully with legitimate questions about the war, but in many cases, they lost the plot. They’re calling for a ceasefire. Well, there was a ceasefire on October 6, the day before Hamas terrorists brutally murdered more than a thousand people inside Israel and took hundreds more as hostages. This hour, I’ll speak to an American Israeli family whose son is still held captive by Hamas since that horrifying day, that brought us to this moment. You don’t hear the pro-Palestinian protesters talking about that. We will.

By Bash’s logic, once a ceasefire is broken, no one can ever call for it to be reinstated—even as the death toll in Gaza nears 35,000. But her claim that there was a ceasefire until Hamas broke it on October 7 is little more than Israeli propaganda: Hundreds of Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the year preceding October 7 (FAIR.org, 7/6/23).

‘Hearkening back to 1930s Europe’

“They didn’t let me get to class using the main entrance!” complains Eli Tsives in one of several videos he posted of confrontations with anti-war demonstrators. “Instead they forced me to walk around. Shame on these people!”

Bash continued:

Now protesting the way the Israeli government, the Israeli prime minister, is prosecuting the retaliatory war against Hamas is one thing. Making Jewish students feel unsafe at their own schools is unacceptable, and it is happening way too much right now.

As evidence of this lack of safety, Bash pointed to UCLA student Eli Tsives, who posted a video of himself confronting motionless antiwar protesters physically standing in his way on campus. “This is our school, and they’re not letting me walk in,” he claims in the clip. Bash ominously described this as “hearkening back to the 1930s in Europe.”

Bash was presumably referring to the rise of the Nazis and their increasing restrictions on Jews prior to World War II. But while Tsives’ clip suggests protesters are keeping him off UCLA campus, they’re in fact blocking him from their encampment—where many Jewish students were present. (Jewish Voice for Peace is one of its lead groups.)

So it’s clearly not Tsives’ Jewishness that the protesters object to. But Tsives was not just any Jewish student; a UCLA drama student and former intern at the pro-Israel group Stand With Us, he had been a visible face of the counter-protests, repeatedly posting videos of himself confronting peaceful antiwar protesters. He has shown up to the encampment wearing a holster of pepper spray.

One earlier video he made showing himself being denied entry to the encampment included text on screen claiming misleadingly that protestors objected to his Jewishness: “They prevented us, Jewish students, from entering public land!” (“You can kiss your jobs goodbye, this is going to go viral on social media,” he tells the protesters.) He also proudly posted his multiple interviews on Fox News, which was as eager as Bash to help him promote his false narrative of antisemitism.

‘Attacking each other’

“Security and [campus police] both retreated as pro-Israel counter-protesters and other groups attacked protesters in the encampment,” UCLA’s student paper (Daily Bruin, 5/1/24) reported.

UCLA protesters had good reason to keep counter-protesters out of their encampment, as those counter-protesters had become increasingly hostile (Forward, 5/1/24; New York Times, 4/30/24). This aggression culminated in a violent attack on the encampment on April 30 (Daily Bruin, 5/1/24).

Late that night, a pro-Israel mob of at least 200 tried to storm the student encampment, punching, kicking, throwing bricks and other objects, spraying pepper spray and mace, trying to tear down plywood barricades and launching fireworks into the crowd. As many as 25 injuries have been reported, including four student journalists for the university newspaper who were assaulted by goons as they attempted to leave the scene (Forward, 5/2/24; Democracy Now!, 5/2/24).

Campus security stood by as the attacks went on; when the university finally called in police support, the officers who arrived waited over an hour to intervene (LA Times, 5/1/24).

(The police were less reticent in clearing out the encampment a day later at UCLA’s request. Reporters on the scene described police in riot gear firing rubber bullets at close range and “several instances of protesters being injured”—LA Times, 5/3/24.)

The mob attacks at UCLA, along with police use of force at that campus and elsewhere, clearly represent the most “destruction, violence and hate” at the encampments, which have been overwhelmingly peaceful. But Bash’s description of the UCLA violence rewrote the narrative to fit her own agenda: “Pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups were attacking each other, hurling all kinds of objects, a wood pallet, fireworks, parking cones, even a scooter.”

When CNN correspondent Stephanie Elam reported, later in the same segment, that the UCLA violence came from counter-protesters, Bash’s response was not to correct her own earlier misrepresentation, but to disparage antiwar protesters: Bash commended the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles for saying the violence does not represent the Jewish community, and snidely commented: “Be nice to see that on all sides of this.”

“For me, never again is never again for anyone,” says a Jewish participant in the UCLA encampment (Instagram, 5/2/24).

‘Violence erupted’

Bash wasn’t the only one at CNN framing antiwar protesters as the violent ones, against all evidence. Correspondent Camila Bernal (5/2/24) reported on the UCLA encampment:

The mostly peaceful encampment was set up a week ago, but violence erupted during counter protest on Sunday, and even more tense moments overnight Tuesday, leaving at least 15 injured. Last night, protesters attempted to stand their ground, linking arms, using flashlights on officers’ faces, shouting and even throwing items at officers. But despite what CHP described as a dangerous operation, an almost one-to-one ratio officers to protesters gave authorities the upper hand.

Who was injured? Who was violent? Bernal left that to viewers’ imagination. She did mention that officers used “what appeared to be rubber bullets,” but the only participant given camera time was a police officer accusing antiwar students of throwing things at police.

Earlier CNN reporting (5/1/24) from UCLA referred to “dueling protests between pro-Palestinian demonstrators and those supporting Jewish students.” It’s a false dichotomy, as many of the antiwar protesters are themselves Jewish, and eyewitness reports suggested that many in the mob were not students and not representative of the Jewish community (Times of Israel, 5/2/24).

CNN likewise highlighted the law and order perspective after Columbia’s president called in the NYPD to respond to the student takeover of Hamilton Hall. CNN Newsroom (5/1/24) brought on a retired FBI agent to analyze the police operation. His praise was unsurprising:

It was impressive. It was surprisingly smooth…. The beauty of America is that we can say things, we can protest, we can do this publicly, even when it’s offensive language. But you can’t trespass and keep people from being able to go to class and going to their graduations. We draw a line between that and, you know, civil control.

CNN host Jake Tapper (4/29/24) criticized the Columbia president’s approach to the protests—for being too lenient: “I mean, a college president’s not a diplomat. A college president’s an authoritarian, really.” (More than a week earlier, president Minouche Shafik had had more than a hundred students arrested for camping overnight on a lawn—FAIR.org, 4/19/24.)

‘Taking room from my show’

**** MISSING IMAGE (difficult for WordPress to copy) **** captioned “The majority of news since the war began…has been skewed by a systemic and institutional bias within the network toward Israel,” a CNN staffer told the Guardian (2/4/24).

Tapper did little to hide his utter contempt for the protesters. He complained:

This is taking room from my show that I would normally be spending covering what is going on in Gaza, or what is going on with the International Criminal Court, talking about maybe bringing charges. We were talking about the ceasefire deal. I mean, this—so I don’t know that the protesters, just from a media perspective, are accomplishing what they want to accomplish, because I’m actually covering the issue and the pain of the Palestinians and the pain of the Israelis—not that they’re protesting for that—less because of this.

It’s Tapper and CNN, of course, who decide what stories are most important and deserve coverage—not campus protesters. Some might say that that a break from CNN‘s regular coverage the Israel’s assault on Gaza would not altogether be a bad thing, as CNN staffers have complained of “regurgitation of Israeli propaganda and the censoring of Palestinian perspectives in the network’s coverage of the war in Gaza” (Guardian, 2/4/24)

The next day, Tapper’s framing of the protests made clear whose grievances he thought were the most worthy (4/30/24): “CNN continues to following the breaking news on college campuses where anti-Israel protests have disrupted academic life and learning across the United States.”

Original article by JULIE HOLLAR republished from FAIR under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Continue ReadingAs Peace Protests Are Violently Suppressed, CNN Paints Them as Hate Rallies