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It broke a long time ago. As a lawyer in Canada I did some criminal legal aid work. There, the client applies for a legal aid ceritificate and then uses it to hire a lawyer, any lawyer who will act for him for a small fee. The market drove lawyers away from legal aid but it was ultimately a free choice and supply met demand. Police questioned accuseds, but there was a right to remain silent. Trials took place in courts. Crimes were well defined by the Criminal Code so as to protect people against the arbitrariness of vague laws which criminalized anything and everything. When I arrived in the UK and took up criminal defence law I immediately realized that it was a doomed profession in a decaying system. The legal profession in the UK treated legal aid as "their" entitlement, not that of the client. They argued against the decimation of their profession not by fighting for legal aid as a necessity in a society where the poor had gone undefended before legal aid was implemented, but as a challenge to their own careers. The predictions were right and the straightjacketed approach of the government, through both Labour and Tory administrations, of restricting legal aid by reducing the profession down to a contracted duty solicitor scheme pushed many, like me, out. At the same time, I realized that the interview provisions of PACE effectively put clients on trial at the police station, giving police unlimited rights of cross-examination while the solicitor was usually shoved up against the far wall, out of the way of the police officer sitting face to face with the client. The trial, often at night, was taped and played as part of the prosecution case in court with the accused having to then explain his statements or challenge the admissibility of much of the tape recording. Then there was the Public Order Act with it's all-encompassing S. 4 which criminalized looking at someone the wrong way and everything and all things worse.

By the time I left England for Scotland, where there are no traped interviews, no s. 4 and no criminal contracting, criminal justice in England was a lost cause. It only got worse with further restrictions on the right to silence, further restrictions on legal aid availability and moves towards
on the spot police-dispensed justice.

Other countries followed the lead of the UK which, at one point in time, lead the world in upholding the rule of law and in protecting the disadvantaged but now where is it going?
"And out of it, as Wind along the Waste,
I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing"

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