Inflated away

‘If Priti Patel’s ban on peaceful protests had been in place earlier, trade unions would be illegal, women wouldn’t have the vote, and the poll tax would still be in place.’ So declared one dismayed tweeter upon this week’s implementation of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, a development that ought to be noted in the pages of the Law Society Gazette.

The sight of noisy ‘Stop Brexit’ activist Steve Bray being attended by a group of police officers intent on seizing his amplifiers was but an amuse-bouche for your average backwoods reactionary, I suspect. Mick Lynch and other assorted subversives better keep tight hold of their megaphones.

‘Protest is not a gift from the state,’ a policy officer from Liberty plaintively declared following the muting of Bray. But she is wrong. That is exactly what protest became, on Tuesday of this week.

Speaking of protests, I look forward to Richard Madeley angrily demanding to know if criminal bar chair Jo Sidhu QC is a ‘marxist’ intent on revolution after his own members went on strike this week. (Won’t happen of course – broadcasters apply different rules to the working classes).

The RMT’s Lynch set a high bar, but Sidhu is an impressive soapbox orator and media performer, and the legal profession needs him to win. It has become a cliche to say this is the last-chance saloon for criminal justice, but cliches become cliches because they’re true. Barristers and solicitors seem unshakeably united this time round. They will need to be.

What has gone largely unremarked in this particular context is the extent to which rampant inflation continues to change the political weather. No one under 40 has any experience of the alarming speed with which high inflation can erode one’s buying power when wages are flatlining. Millennials and others are rapidly finding out.

It is worth recalling the numbers here. The Law Society showed that the overall ‘pay’ increase for solicitors envisaged in the impact assessment from the Ministry of Justice on Sir Christopher Bellamy’s report amounts to 9%. In June the inflation rate topped 9% and is set to go higher. The grim reality is that Bellamy’s report is already obsolescent.