We were rather too busy with the sheep yesterday to keep abreast with the news but we have rested well overnight to catch up with the quite extraordinary event yesterday of lawyers picketing the Scottish Parliament building.
If we have understood the position correctly, the problem is the Scottish Civil Justice and Criminal Legal Assistance Bill which makes solicitors responsible for collecting the contributions accused person have to make towards legal aid, rather than the Scottish Legal Aid Board as had hitherto been the case. In other words, solicitors were expected to act as the collecting taxman for The Scottish Government! No wonder they took umbrage.
While that as a principle was bad enough, matters were exacerbated greatly when the Justice Committee of the Scottish Parliament, who had been examining the Bill, switched sides from supporting the lawyers to supporting the government. This was in response to an order from on high, ie from The Wee Man himself, to support the government. We could just as easily have been in Nazi Germany 1933-1945, yet again.
For the record, there are nine members on the Justice Committee, five of whom form the SNP majority. Those five are (1) Christine Grahame (convener); (2) Colin Keir; (3) John Finnie; (4) Roderick Campbell and (5) Sandra White. What a useless, unprincipled shower, even by the standards of the nationalists.
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