Francis FitzGibbon

From The Blog

The Law plc

18 June 2013

When Tony Blair announced radical changes to his mentor Lord Irvine’s job as Lord High Chancellor without warning in 2003, he provoked the wall-paper connoisseur and would-be Cardinal Wolsey into resigning. The horse-trading that followed gave us the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, which stripped the Lord Chancellor of his judicial role, set up the Supreme Court as the final Court of Appeal for the UK, and a new Department of Constitutional Affairs, with an elected MP to be secretary of state instead of a peer. It changed its name to the Ministry of Justice in 2007, and has mushroomed.

Short Cuts: Without Legal Aid

Francis FitzGibbon, 6 June 2013

A fundamental shift in the relationship between the government and the governed is taking place: by restricting access to the law, the state is handing itself an alarming immunity from legal scrutiny. There are several aspects to this: the partial or total withdrawal of state financial support for people who lack the means to pay for legal advice and representation; and for those who can pay,...

The Case of N.: The strange world of asylum law

Francis FitzGibbon, 21 July 2005

In March 1998 a 24-year-old woman entered the United Kingdom from Uganda. She used a false name and a false passport. She was extremely ill and within a couple of days was admitted to Guy’s Hospital, where she was diagnosed with full-blown Aids and a cluster of Aids-related illnesses including Kaposi’s sarcoma. She had not known she had Aids and did not come here for medical...

Letter

Writers in Camps

1 April 1982

SIR: I was surprised to read the following remark in Mr Sillitoe’s article ‘Writing and Publishing’ (LRB, 1 April): ‘The only good writing emerging from that country [i.e. Russia] appears from the prison camps.’ It follows that all Soviet writers not in camps are not good writers. He must also have a low opinion of writers such as Pasternak or Bulgakov, who did not serve terms in camps. Maybe...

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