What need has he of repeal, however, if his government can deny the fundamental rights granted by the act by cutting the umbilical cord between the individual and justice – adequate legal representation.

Those most in need of legal redress are often those least able to afford it. Indeed, for the majority of the population, access to justice and to fundamental human rights, including a fair hearing, is dependent on either legal aid (for those with no or extremely limited means) or conditional fee agreements. In those circumstances, the coalition’s decision to withdraw legal aid altogether in a host of fields and drastically to circumscribe the operation of conditional fee agreements is to be deplored.

The categories of law for which legal aid will no longer be available could not have been better designed to penalise the most vulnerable, including immigration, employment and, the field in which I specialise, clinical negligence.

Those who currently qualify for legal aid to investigate and to pursue a claim arising from their medical care are almost always children or adults so grievously injured that they are incapable of work. They may have suffered catastrophic brain injury and require round the clock care. The burden of providing that care will be falling on their family who, in turn, will have had to give up their own work to do so. They are in short the very people that society should be trying to help.

The cost of even the preliminary investigations into the merits of a potential claim will usually run to tens of thousands of pounds – mostly incurred in seeking the opinion of expert witnesses. Those are sums which even the most affluent would shrink from committing to the mere possibility of a successful claim: for the vast majority who do not have such resources, the cost is literally prohibitive. Without access to legal aid (or an alternative means of funding), they will never know whether the injuries suffered by them or by their child were avoidable and they will never receive the compensation which would make life for them at least bearable.

Until now, for the majority who do not qualify for legal aid, there has been the CFA or ‘no win, no fee’, a mechanism which has immeasurably broadened access to justice for the individual. That, too, is now under assault from the government. The net effect of its proposals will be that lawyers (if they wish to stay in business) will only be able to take on that small minority of cases where success is, from the outset, almost guaranteed and, by limiting the claimant’s right to recover his costs from the defendant, it will significantly reduce the amount of compensation which he receives.

When he announced that legal aid would no longer be available for cases of clinical negligence, Ken Clarke explained that they had a ready alternative in CFAs. The recommendations of Lord Justice Jackson as to CFAs (which form the basis of the government’s proposals) were specifically predicated on legal aid being available in cases of clinical negligence. In those circumstances, simultaneously to abolish one form of funding and severely to curtail the other is little short of perverse.

Were the government to implement either one of these proposals, it would be a significant blow to the public’s right to seek justice. The simultaneous implementation of both would be a catastrophe. Labour must fight, as it has always done, for the rights and liberties of the many.

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