Understandably, the book spends most of its time discussing events under the Labour government since 1997. Critical in general though they are, the authors are occasionally over-generous. The Community Legal Service (CLS) was a slogan dreamt up on the back of a fag packet by Paul Boateng MP in 1995. In truth, it never justified the LAG authors' description as “coherent”, even as a vision. Any such coherent articulation consistently defeated both Mr Boateng, soon translated to Labour's man in Pretoria, and his successors. The CLS was, and remains, a jumble of services defined by being unrelated to crime—public law, family law, negligence and social welfare law. In some ways, the division of civil from criminal legal aid did clients a positive disservice. The funding split accelerated the distancing of lawyers undertaking civil and criminal work. From a client perspective, this was not necessarily a good thing. Way back in the 1970s, North Kensington Law Centre argued strongly—and against the rest of the law centre movement and legal establishment—that civil and criminal clients were, if not the same people, often very closely related.

Alas, if Labour's days come to a close in a way that now seems all too likely, it is not clear that they will leave much in the field of legal aid other than changes of name. The Ministry of Justice, Legal Services Commission and their forbears failed to control the legal aid budget. As a result, Labour has hitched its policies to the cart, helpfully left untended by the outgoing Lord Mackay, of compulsory competitive tendering as the one way of controlling costs. The book makes clear, however, that Labour has, at least, been sensible enough to wait as long as it can until before actually implementing a process likely to prove difficult and contentious.

The money problem cannot be dodged in any serious debate on the way forward. The LAG authors might be criticised for their silence on alternatives to compulsory tendering—though few practitioners will pick them up on it. But, we have to acknowledge that no government would allow legal aid spending to rise at the same rate as it did through the 1980s and 1990s. This is greatly to be lamented but true. Access to justice and legal aid will only escape the axe—and rightly so—if they can be supported by arguments that the government of the day can understand and accept.

So, this book is timely. The battle is on to persuade the next government that it should spend £2bn a year on legal aid, even when the country is sitting on levels of debt unparalleled in peacetime. Practitioners are going to have to fight all the way. More than at any previous time, we need a justification for spending which is coherent; which prioritises services over their providers and which speaks the language of democratic participation—not professional advantage. This book makes a valuable contribution to this process.