My letter has prompted many contributions from advocate colleagues. At Birmingham Magistrates’ Court, where special ‘civil unrest’ sessions were held on the Sunday, by midmorning on most week days you would expect to see tumbleweed drifting down the court corridors; so bereft of work is the judiciary.

I demand to know why there was the need to promote what would have been orthodox sittings on the Monday, to extraordinary - and extraordinarily expensive - sessions a mere 24 hours earlier. The additional work generated might have been comfortably accommodated in the Monday session. For once, courts might have been operating at something approaching their full capacity.

They could have coped since what would have been Monday’s non-‘civil unrest’ work was also ‘promoted’ to Sunday sessions and was accommodated, thereby leaving the Monday session even lighter on workload than is now the norm.

One shudders to think of the additional and considerable cost gratuitously visited on the system. Quite apart from the expense of the court premises being opened specially, what of the money quite unnecessarily squandered on the services of a Crown Prosecution Service advocate, who was specially shipped in (for appropriate consideration) from Manchester? Had his counterparts in the West Midlands been approached first, I wonder, and if not why not? For sure it was local defence advocates who bore the brunt for no extra cost.

Was all of this exercise designed to make some kind of feeble political point?

Malcolm Fowler, Dennings, Tipton; Law Society council member, Birmingham and District