A thought-provoking phone call this week from a solicitor (who wished to remain nameless, of which more below) about the Gazette leader column’s bullish stance on legal aid. It came in the context of this week’s events at the TUC, which is gearing up for a concerted battle over the public spending cuts to be announced next month. The media seem agreed that the brothers and sisters are stirring after 25 years of perceived irrelevance – whether we like it or not.He rang to protest that we were being party-political; which I assured him was not the case. If anything, we were even more scathing about the last administration’s policy on legal aid; deep spending cuts were signalled by Labour too. So when you think about it, we’re violently at odds with all three major parties on the subject.

What we actually did was endorse Roger Smith’s argument that solicitors who oppose legal aid cuts are going to need a more considered strategy than kneejerk opposition – and accept at the outset the intellectual case at least for the examination of cuts.

Moreover, the column is marked Opinion; readers are perfectly at liberty to disagree with that opinion and doubtless many do each week. An opinion with which no one disagrees scarcely counts as an opinion at all.

There’s the rub though. What struck me most about the caller was his evident frustration at the Gazette’s apparent unwillingness to offer a contrary viewpoint. ‘The money isn’t there, and even if it were, many solicitors don’t believe we should be spending so much anyway. And the crisis was caused not only by City bankers, but by a spendthrift Labour government.’

Not unreasonably, I asked him to write a letter or even an article making these perfectly arguable points. But he declined to do so, citing the vilification of his peers that would follow. ‘Certain views just can’t be expressed,’ he said, ‘you’d be slaughtered and victimised’.

He also alluded to the Gazette’s promotion of human rights as always a ‘good thing’ when he and solicitor colleagues believe the position is much more complicated. ‘The Gazette is in a PC straitjacket,’ he concluded.

As a journalist, I don’t mind being told I’m talking rubbish – it goes with the job. But it does worry me if people believe their voices can’t be heard in their own professional magazine. I stressed to him that we are quite willing and able to convey the opinions of solicitors who are – to use his term – ‘non-PC’. But those opinions have to be expressed first.

As I told him, I haven’t been able to find anyone to argue that the legal aid budget is too high and explain why it should be cut down to size. Does that phone call explain why?