Take it from a former barrister: Chris Grayling is right to reform legal aid

Shakespeare took it a little far in Henry IV, Part II, when Dick the Butcher said, ‘Let’s kill all the lawyers.’ Chris Grayling hasn’t made the same proposal but you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, listening to the howls of anguish and indignation coming from the Inns of Court. Grayling, the first non-lawyer to be made Lord Chancellor since the 17th century, has simply said he wants to make some savings in the legal aid bill. To the lawyers, unaccustomed to having their privileges and subsidies challenged by anyone, this means war.

Already, 90 millionaire QCs — poor, impoverished Cherie Blair among them — have written a letter to the Telegraph attacking legal aid cuts for judicial review cases. A group of leading solicitors wrote to the Times to declare the reforms ‘an attack on the fundamental rule of law’. A retired Court of Appeal judge, Sir Anthony Hooper, has claimed that cutting this subsidy would destroy England’s ‘world-renowned’ system of fair justice.