miss it! Cuba: Beyond the Crossroads also critical picture of life and people in today's Cuba Order Ridenour's book today Published by Socialist Resistance £5.50 inc postage (cheques payable to Resistance) from PO Box 1109 London N4 2UU MOSTYN reports This is an age of increasing authoritarianism - from 101 new ways to criminalise children and increased sentencing powers, to draconian anti-terror laws and Britain's complicity with "extraordinary rendition".
But we are still some way off living in a police state. Some of the biggest political battles of recent years have been over civil liberties. The government's flagship internment without trial policy was beaten back.
And even though a repressive scheme of house arrests has replaced it - this has so far only netted 18 individuals, a tiny proportion of the "terrorist sympathisers" that security pundits claim are roaming the streets.
The work of committed lawyers is often at the heart of vital, element of the post-war welfare state reforms. ensures support and assistance for the most deprived and vulnerable sections of the working class when they tangle with courts in the fight for rights.
The attack has been building up for some years. Dovetailed into Labour's law and order rhetoric and strong state policies have been the stripping away of civil legal aid, a freezing of lawyers pay and the re-introduction of means testing.
Now a new package of measures will, if successful, mark a qualitative roll back of the very basis for the system. In response solicitors called strike action, beginning with a three-day boycott of magistrates court work in midMarch and there is the promise of more to come.
The first stage of the new package is a proposed change they sometimes need ten. Inevitably this will result, as it is intended to, in a lower quality service.
The second stage will involve a process of competitive tendering for franchises forcing all lawyers to compete to offer lower and lower bids to do more and more work. This is the Walmart approach to legal services - stack 'em high and sell 'em cheap.
Except that instead of shoddy household goods it's the clang of prison doors followed by increasingly long down-time in Britain's bulging and fetid Victorian gaol regime.
In London the explicit objective is to slash by half the number of solicitors firms - with a smaller number of large firms lowering the unit costs and less choice the inevitable outcome.
Particularly vulnerable will be the small specialist, radical elsewhere.
Young black people will suffer disproportionately, with less challenge to the police, the prosecution and courts and more going to prison for longer terms.
We are heading down the American path - a "public defender" system based on low-pay, over-work and low morale.
The kind of system that has led to death row prisoners appealing on the grounds that their lawyers were drunk, asleep or incompetent.
Solicitors striking might sound weird and wonderful. 18 months ago barristers tried the same against a ten-year pay freeze.
Like the bank clerks and teachers of decades past and, more recently, lecturers and doctors - these are "professionals" who are beginning to realise they are "workers".
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