City law firms back star-studded cast in pre-general election bid to alert public to dangers of cuts to the publicly funded system
Legal aid lawyers are so impoverished — or just plain randy — that they routinely engage in three-in-a-bed bunk-ups.
That’s the message from a film released today, which is designed to raise public awareness of the alleged damage fee and eligibility cuts have wrought on the 66-year-old system.
A start-studded cast from the English stage and screen lends the voice-overs to the six-and-a-half-minute cartoon — with the ensemble headed by Maxine Peake, who starred as Martha Costello QC in the BBC drama Silk.
The film — which was launched today on The Guardian newspaper’s website — was funded by a cross-section of the legal profession, including several City law firms.
On the list of backers are Square Mile heavyweights Ashurt, Dentons, Reed Smith, Simmons & Simmons and Travers Smith. Barristers’ chambers Matrix also chucked in some cash, along with high profile legal aid law firms Leigh Day and Tuckers Solicitors.
The crucial scene comes at about 5.18 in the video (embedded below) and depicts the “Legal Aid Team” — a group of three superhero lawyers — waking from a harrowing nightmare. The two women and one man have for reasons of either financial penury or sexual pleasure clearly spent the night together.
But regardless of why they were bunking up, their sleep was traumatically disturbed by nightmare visions of a dystopian Britain in which society’s most vulnerable have no access to justice thanks to the conniving of evil Lord Chancellor Grayling.
The Grayling character spends most of the video belting out a mad scientist chortle, but he pauses long enough for a rough-and-ready explanation of core recent legal aid cuts.
However, there is no reference to the Evil LC’s predecessors — Lord Falconer and Jack Straw, the Labour Party double act that bears some responsibility for at least gathering the kindling for the legal aid bonfire.
According to the film-makers, the parties’ pre-election positions on the cuts falls down as follows: The Conservatives will press ahead, Labour is inclined to amend, the Liberal Democrats might reverse them, as might UKIP, while the Greens are the only party wholeheartedly committed to restoring legal aid to its former glory.
Credit for effort goes to Fat Rat Films, the company behind the bid to get the public excited about the implications of the last government’s policy towards legal aid and access to justice issues.
But at the risk of being accused of churlishness, Legal Cheek is bound to point out two unfortunate instances of gavels creeping into the film’s courtroom scenes.
At the 42-second mark, what appear to be High Court judges are depicted giving the bench a right old thwack.
And then at 5.05 a banging gavel sound affect appears over the depiction of a very American-looking court building, accompanied by a judge intoning “Order in the court”.
Joining Peake in the voice-over studio was theatrical legend Simon Callow, Gurkha Justice Campaign supporter and actress Joanna Lumley, Sally Hawkins of “Happy Go Lucky” and “Blue Jasmine” fame, and Richard Wilson from the BBC’s “One Foot in the Grave”.