What is a housing lawyer? Or what is a social welfare lawyer? Answer- we are
people who represent and come to court for people with very little money. We are paid for mostly by the tax-payer. Why
should the tax-payer give a damn?
We are the people who work for charities like Law Centres or
CAB’s. We are also those working in private
firms set up on a for profit basis, staffed by underpaid and idealistic
individuals, with a thirst for social justice. It is an honourable calling.
We speak for the battered wife, the cancer victim, the
abused child. We speak for the tenant who has had her papers ripped up in front
of her face, and who has been put onto the street because her landlord is too
lazy or ignorant to take his case to court to obtain a valid eviction order.
We speak for the student who is qualifying as a teacher when
her husband deserts her with 2 kids, and leaves her with rent responsibilities
she can’t meet.
We speak for the tenant who paid a deposit for her private
tenancy, when the landlord has pocketed the coin. Rules say landlord should
have registered her deposit, but where are her rights if she has no voice?
We speak for the soldier who has been mutilated by war, and
fight the letters that would take his benefits away. We fight the veterans' rights no matter which side they fought for, on disability grounds.
We speak for disabled adults under 35 years of age who are
racked by the room rent that slashes their Housing Benefit. It is expected these “young” people will share
accommodation with each other, but there are too few flats to share.
We speak for those on threshold benefits who must pay a new
Poll Tax because Council Tax Benefit has been restructured. £3 a week from someone on Income Support will
become the norm. Where are the marches we saw in the 90’s?
We speak for the council tenant who raised a family in a two
bed flat, whose wife dies, whose children moved away. He faces a bedroom tax on
the spare room- yet there are no unoccupied one bedroom council flats that he
can move to- if he moves to the private sector his Housing Benefit bill will be
higher and we will all pay more.
We speak for the homeless people. The family skewered by the benefit changes,
the war veteran sleeping on the streets for six months. They are shipped out of
London because it is cheaper to have fewer poor people here- yet what is London
without it’s cockneys and with its parvenus?
We speak for the Londoners who die violently and are
remembered by flowers placed on random corners, which in their turn wither and
die.
We speak for British children who have no proper home and
are hungry and scantily shod because their foreign mothers never married their
British fathers. When did we hate
children so because their mothers fell pregnant to men that left them
there?
We speak for children who live for years in cramped
emergency hostels with no room to breathe, let alone do their homework from
school. Keep the poor stupid, that’s the way. No academies or free schools for
these kids.
We speak for the Poles and other Eastern Europeans. Polish pilots
flew Spitfires in the war, yet we are unwelcoming when their children fall on
hard times.
We speak.
Yet on 1.4.13 we will speak no more. The clumsy Legal Aid Sentencing and Punishment
of Offenders Act will cut off Legal Aid and will seal our mouths with lead. Legal Aid cuts will shut our mouths, and silence the voices of the marginalised among us. .
We speak for the
London that matters. We do not speak for millionaires with their high falluting
tax schemes and their high paid lawyers and accountants. I speak for the living
and vibrant Borough of Hackney, thus London , thus the world.
Let us all speak.
