Shadow Lord Chancellor Sadiq Khan MP has a slightly rougher ride than he might have hoped for at today’s demonstration against legal aid cuts. Although his speech was broadly well received, for the first time at one of these rallies I heard him heckled by not one, but at least three protestors.

Would he, his introduction asked, give an unequivocal commitment to overturn any legal aid cuts? That of course would be impossible for any Labour spokesman to do; and unsurprisingly, no answer came.

He began with an attack on his ministerial opposite number.

When you have blind ambition plus wilful ignorance, you have Chris Grayling

he said to cheers, and of all Lord Chancellors Grayling was, he said, “the most legally illiterate in a thousand years”. Here, Khan said

is a man who thinks the Magna Carta is a bottle of champagne

A good line which I hadn’t heard before.

He laid into the entire government, too, saying

it’s been a mission of David Cameron and Nick Clegg, over the last four years, to deny ordinary people access to justice

and that the government had shown a “pattern of behaviour”:

They’re changing the way we do judicial review, they’ve changed “no win, no fee”, they’re attacking our human rights law, and they’re attacking legal aid.

But as he began to address the financial scale of the cuts –

first they cut £350m from civil legal aid – a third of the civil legal aid budget – and now a quarter of the criminal budget

– some of the audience seemed to lose sympathy with him, and began to attack Labour’s own record. You can hear a woman protester shouting

Your government did the same!

and ask, in a reference to the former Labour justice minister,

What about Geoff Hoon?

I’m pretty sure I heard two women on either side of me making comments about Labour – and you hear at least one male voice, too, shouting

What about you?

and, at the end, booing.

I am with you, and we will defeat them

said Sadiq Khan. But I wonder to what extent the audience were really with him.

Of course it’s understandable that Labour spokesmen should want to attack the government over legal aid while making as few specific spending pledges as they can. Ed Balls’s fiscal plans leave them little room to restore the cuts this government makes. But I sensed that quite a few of today’s audience wondered what Sadiq Khan’s attacks on Chris Grayling really added up to, in the end.

2014-03-07T23:09:21+00:00