I shall be brief and to the point. I had not planned on blogging today. But then came along the BBC. With this:
Becky killers got £400,000 in legal aid https://t.co/94MTgSzd3z
— BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) March 3, 2016
Now, this kind of “story” I’ve come to expect from certain news-peddlers. The Mail, the Telegraph, the Mirror, The Sun – they kneel, supine and obedient, mouths agape and greedily trembling with the anticipation of swallowing whatever foul excretion the Ministry of Justice cocks pump in, which they will then dutifully spit out on demand like mendacious pez dispensers.
But the BBC? Come on, chaps. Where the flip are your news values? Just what is the story here? If it’s the sheer horror of bad people “getting” taxpayer’s money to spend on defence lawyers, then you’re missing an awful lot of stories. 600,000 per year or so, in fact. But assuming the BBC hasn’t gone all Chris Grayling on us and developed a reflexive aversion to the concept of legal aid – of people prosecuted by the state being entitled to competent legal representation – then their “angle” must be the tried n tested bait of, “Isn’t it terrible how much money these bad people are entitled to”. Like £400,000 was wired to their bank accounts for them to wantonly fritter away on Marlboros and Special Brew and Sky TV and quadbikes and all those other things that this government assumes welfare benefits really goes on.
Well if that is your angle, Daily BBC, then you’re going to need to provide some context for this story to have any meaning. In particular, I’d suggest you need to be prepared to answer these:
1) How many hours did the defence solicitors spend preparing the case? I’m talking hours at the police station, hours of conferences with the client taking instructions, hours taking witness statements, instructing experts, drafting defence statements and proofs of evidence, attending on the barrister at court, photocopying, reading the (no doubt for a murder of this size) considerable volume of papers.
2) How much money did the defence solicitors spend preparing the case? That nice juicy figure is gross. Out of that, the firm will have to pay staff wages, holiday pay, pensions, sick pay, building rent, professional indemnity insurance, admin such as photocopying and printing (as the CPS no longer serve physical paper cases), experts’ fees, travel to court, travel to prison. If you’re not including those, it’s akin to saying that a builder who charges you £500 for materials and £100 labour is creaming in £600 an hour.
3) How long did the barrister spend preparing the case? How many barristers were there? How many hundreds of hours went into preparing this murder? How many pages of evidence were there? Hundreds? Thousands? How many boxes of unpaginated disclosure did the barrister(s) have to trawl through?
4) How long was the trial, and how many hours each day was the barrister (a) in court; and (b) preparing in the evening for the following day? How many complex legal applications required lengthy skeleton argument and extensive legal research?
5) Are you aware that the figure of £400k includes VAT? How does that affect your scoop?
6) That all worked out, what was the actual net hourly rate of these professionals, who, let us not forget, will be among the very finest in their field?
7) Is that net figure too high? How does it compare to other professions? To other areas of law? To medicine? To accountants? Architects? Fluffers? Zookeepers?
8) Returning to your headline, if £400,000 is too much for society to spend on defending the most serious offence in English law, let’s have a comparison – how much was spent by the police on investigating, and by the CPS on their caseworkers, in-house lawyers and instructed Q.C.? Was it more or less than £400,000?
9) What figure would you say is reasonable, BBC, for a civilised society to spend on safeguarding the rights of two people accused of a crime carrying mandatory life imprisonment? If not £400,000, then what? Give us a figure. Show us how and why it should be less.
I do not have the answers to the above. I wasn’t in the case and haven’t done the research. But I don’t have to, because I’m not the one presenting this out-of-context figure as somehow imparting a greater meaning. If the BBC considers itself a serious bastion of fair and impartial journalism, it needs to do better than recycling MoJ press releases aimed at no higher cause than fomenting a public association between “legal aid”, “fat cat lawyers” and “undeserving child murderers”.
Shame on you, BBC.