As the country wakes up to a new government, Simon Davis, the Law Society’s 175th president, has warned against a ‘kneejerk’ reaction to the London Bridge attack that left two young people dead.
During the election campaign, politicians had been polishing up their law and order credentials with promises of extra police officers. But there was little in the party manifestos that presented a coherent set of policy reforms across the justice system in relation to legal aid, prisons, probation or the court estate. And it took the tragic events on London Bridge to expose what practitioners have been warning for years—that the whole justice system has been systematically starved of funds for more than a decade.
Immediately after the attack, party leaders launched into a ‘blame game’ about who was responsible for Usman Khan being free to kill, followed by pledges to ramp
