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Mr Crawford - The failings of Labour 1997-2010 have absolutely no relevance to this issue. I am sorry to say you repeatedly make party political points here of no relevance at all. I a betting you are a past or present Tory candidate?

Why do I say all this? - simply because the amount of legal aid money in issue is so tiny, in relative terms. We are talking about £215million. Read carefully below, with your calculator:

The NHS spends £215m about every 17 hours.
The Royal Bank of Scotland paid out £576m last month in bonuses. It is State-owned - and it LOST 8.2billion last year. This was allowed to happen. Yes, almost three times the value of these legal aid cuts.
The BBC wasted £98m in ONE doomed digital IT project.

I could go on. These are examples, not politically chosen, simply to show the government is prepared to spend plenty of money in these areas, of many multiples larger than criminal legal aid cuts. So this is about CHOICES and priorities NOT necessary austerity. And by the way, do you honestly believe that if the Tories had been in power 2005-2010 they would have regulated the City more tightly and thus avoided the global financial crash? The only people who claim that are naïve, or Tory candidates, or both.
Yes Labour overspent on welfare, but that is not what led to the crash - you have sadly swallowed a myth peddled by those determined to forget the fact that the people who caused the global crash were some of the wealthiest in the world, and it is the poorest who will now disproportionately pay the price.

Please would you wise up, put down your Conservative membership card, and perhaps do something helpful instead of peddling doom and claiming it was written in stone 5 years ago.