The prisons minister, Rory Stewarta and David Gauke" We call for you to be sacked.

But the near collapse of the entire criminal justice system can happen right under our noses, and none but judges, lawyers, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and prison staff know anything about it.

Squalid prisons are just the start. The entire justice system is in meltdown, public view.

Prisons did top the news on Monday when the horrifying inspection report on HMP Birmingham forced the government to take it back from G4S. Blood, vomit, cockroaches, rats, the air thick with the drug spice, staff hiding, in fear of violent prisoners:

 here was a scene of hell and squalor that should knock the “prison works” nonsense out of the most ardent lock-’em-up MP.One shock inspection report after another has thudded on to ministers’ desks, many among the 102 state-run as well the 14 privately run jails, revealing a prison estate in crisis. Under all previous governments, journalists could regularly visit any prison with due notice – and prison governors would speak out about problems. 

Now they are frightened into silence. I was allowed to film a whole Panorama programme in the most disturbed and violent part of Holloway prison, known as the “muppet wing”, in the Tory 1980s, when authorities were still open about prison problems. No longer.

In 2010 the shutters came down and it’s virtually impossible for journalists to visit prisons, except for a rare manicured walk-about with a minister. Why not? Because what the media would see would be too disgusting. Because desperate staff might say too much. Because the worst are too out of control. But where scrutiny by the press is denied, as it is now in benefit offices and anywhere else the effects of austerity are on display, this government bars access to public services as never before in my professional lifetime.

 Secrecy suggests shame. The prisons minister, Rory Stewart, a semi-amateur politician, earns growls from colleagues for promising to resign if there’s no improvement by next year. He could start by opening the gates of his filthy estate to us of the filthy fourth estate.Prisons returning to Newgate conditions are just the most extreme fallout from the disintegrating justice system, from inadequate policing to a crumbling CPS, malfunctioning magistrate and crown courts and vanished legal aid. The tottering edifice is only kept going by the superhuman goodwill of the dwindling numbers operating it.  Who else sees it, beyond frequent-flyer criminals? The public – victims, witnesses and jurors – may only touch it once in a lifetime: then they find delays, adjournments and collapsed cases deeply distressing.

Cuts of departments – a huge 40% to be sliced away

The Treasury knows this is a secret world, hidden from public eyes, as courts are removed ever further from the local community, an integral part no longer. On the last day of term, when the government scuttles out bad news in written statements, the MoJ slid out an announcement that seven more courts are to be shut and sold off. That’s on top of the 258 that have closed and been sold off in England and Wales since 2010. In the great sale of public property – hospitals, schools, police stations, courts and more – the Treasury demands that capital raised be sucked into the running costs of remaining services, regardless of how a growing population will need this valuable land, gone forever.

Courts are so packed that clerks book in as many as seven extra cases, summoning lawyers, witnesses, victims and defendants from afar to wait all day, hoping a case collapses and they can be slotted in. If not, they are all summoned on another date to lose another day off work; child care rearranged, carers rebooked. Cases are often adjourned several times over or collapse altogether from bungled evidence collection. An over-stretched CPS after 25% cuts and a shrunken police force means evidence goes uncollected or is not disclosed to the defence, so the case goes under, setting free violent criminals and domestic abusers out of sheer incompetence. Political pieties promise to “put the victim first” – but victims are often left bereft and endangered by failed cases, after travelling miles several times over. A 2017 government report showed some 50% of cases are not prepared for hearings after the CPS lost a third of its workforce.

The great 1945 government is celebrated for its welfare state of pensions, benefits and the NHS. But less remembered is how its legal aid brought equal access to justice. No longer. In 2012 legal aid entitlement was removed from family, housing, immigration, debt and employment, leaving the poorest and weakest unable to claim their rights. Those trying to represent themselves take hours of expensive court time, where a lawyer representing them would cut to the chase. Defendants are granted longer sentences and less bail by magistrates when left to defend themselves: 15% of those remanded in prison, often for long periods, are found not guilty.

The unfolding calamity in our criminal justice system is best told in The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It’s Broken.
This angry yet forensic analysis from first arrest to prison is a gripping front-line view by an anonymous, lowly criminal barrister. Read and rage at evidence that “every day the provably guilty walk free”, while the hapless needlessly end up in jail.. 

All 650 MPs were sent a copy, crowdfunded by young legal aid lawyers. A ComRes survey of MPs’ summer reading finds it to be the third most popular beach-list book, a matching tale of woe to follow Tim Shipman’s account of the Brexit fiasco and Anthony Beevor’s history of the battle of Arnhem. But will they read it, or is it just listed by their spads, while they devour the latest Jack Reacher?

If they do, all 650 should return in September boiling with indignation. What have they been doing, prattling away about “sovereignty” and the supremacy of our laws over European courts, when gross injustice is done here daily by a legal system in meltdown, as reported by the Public Accounts Committee? Two-thirds of crown court cases are delayed or collapse, leaving 55% of witnesses saying they would never do it again.

When criminal barristers went on strike recently against 40% pay cuts leaving them often with less than the living wage after travel costs and waiting time, the government said: “Any action to disrupt the courts is unacceptable.” But they are the deliberate disrupters of a legal system that is the basis of democracy.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist.

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 Not forgetting IPP Prisoner being failed and those with learning diffrences defending  themself .

 The outgoing head of the family courts in England and Wales has raised concerns about access to family courts and said help for litigants who had to represent themselves due to cuts to legal aid was “woefully inadequate”.
 https://www.theguardian.com/law/2018/jul/27/access-to-justice-in-family-courts-inadequate-says-outgoing-head

 Government admits role in Birmingham prison failure

 prisoners lived in squalid. Roger Swindells, from the prison’s independent monitoring board, wrote to the MoJ about the poor state of HMP Birmingham earlier in the summer, saying both the MoJ controllers and G4S were responsible.prison authorities had failed to get a grip of new psychoactive substances, such as spice, which he said caused “crazy aggressive behaviour”.Stewart, who said last week he would resign if conditions in 10 public sector prisons did not improve, declined to add HMP Birmingham to that list.

 “I’m not going get into giving a blank cheque to resign over every prison in the country,” he said.The chief inspector, Peter Clarke, said it was a “reasonable conclusion” that the MoJ had failed in its oversight of HMP Birmingham and that there had been an “abject failure” of contract management.

“How is it that in 18 months a prison which is supposedly being run under the auspices of a tightly managed contract, how has that been allowed to deteriorate?” he said on Today.Steve Gillan, the general secretary of the Prison Officers Association called on the justice minister David Gauke to resign and said the government should halt all prison privatisations and open a public inquiry into why the government has missed a succession of warnings from staff.

 Gillan said ministers should be held responsible for privatising a prison for ideological reasons.“We have always faced a political ideology from government and now we are seeing the realities.“There should be no blame attached to prison officers and related grades at Birmingham for this crisis. The blame must lay with government for their ridiculous policies that have caused the prison crisis, not just at Birmingham but up and down the country,” he said. 

Theresa May sack  minister David Gauke though the general secretary of the Prison Officers Association called on the justice minister David Gauke to resign. 

 https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/aug/20/government-admits-role-in-birmingham-prison-failure-g4s