This is the speech I made to the #Just4Justice Legal Assist protest on 7 March 2014.
As you in all probability know, we’re going to be listening to rather a lot over the subsequent yr concerning the Magna Carta, because in 2015 it is going to be 800 years previous.
It’s going to be an enormous deal – there are going to be celebrations everywhere in the world, with week-long occasions in cities across the UK including London, Canterbury, Oxford, Hereford, Salisbury, Durham.
There will probably be a three-month-long celebration in Runnymede where the charter was sealed, as well as books, TV Exhibits, an opera, a poem by the poet laureate, a tapestry, generic drugs, commemorative stamps and cash, exhibitions in Lincoln and Salisbury Cathedrals ,The Bodleian Library, and the Nationwide Archives and The Library of Congress within the USA.
But I do know what I feel the most effective birthday current can be for Magna Carta – for Chris Grayling to announce he’s going to scrap his plans to abolish the rights and the freedoms set out in it.
Resembling in clause 40, which says:
To nobody will we promote, to nobody deny or delay right or justice.
It’s the inspiration for the principle of equality beneath the regulation that we've got taken without any consideration for generations in the UK.
Now Mr Grayling plans to scrap it, and create a 2-tier justice system – justice for the rich, McJustice for the poor.
It’s it’s a disgrace it’s had to come to this – legal professionals having to protest fairly than go to courtroom to defend their shoppers.
And it’s a disgrace that 800 years after Magna Carta, we're nonetheless having to satisfy to demand equality for all underneath the regulation.
The submit Justice for the rich, McJustice for the poor. appeared first on David Rowntree.
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