11 October 2013
Postcards for Justice
The Editors
Stephen Sedley, Francis FitzGibbon and Joanna Biggs have written in the LRB about 'the radical changes currently being made to the legal aid system' and the government's proposals 'to undermine judicial review by starving claimants of legal aid on several fronts'. Save Justice UK are running a campaign 'to help raise awareness of the devastating impact that the legal aid cuts and the changes to judicial review will have on the ability of some of the most vulnerable people in our society to access justice'. They plan to deliver 10,000 postcards to Nick Clegg next month, asking him to 'take a stand' against the policy. If you'd like to help gather signatures, write to savejusticeuk@gmail.com for a pack of 25 postcards.
Comments
I have long used the image/text medium of the postcard as a simple way of saying hello to people, from different places, I suppose that's it. Currently the cost of a postcard stamp is the old 10 shillings, ten bob, unimaginable even now, it will get worse.
Good luck to Alice Munro for her postcards from the meterologically and otherwise, it would seem, monochrome world of western Ontario.
Christian Lorentzen has mentioned "her goodness, her greatness, her majorness or her bestness" with which she is always pre-fixed by critics. To the greatness should be added greyness, perhaps. She is surely promoting the more colourful life by highlighting it against the grey of western Ontario. Larkin did the same in my view, "Don't be like me, drab, confined, kept-in."
Now we have a 2013 Booker winner Eleanor Catton who was born and spent her first six years in western Ontario. She is the youngest ever winner with the longest book. There's more to western Ontario than you can say on just postcards, evidently.