Paddy Hill: Come out on strike for good

The speech that went down best at yesterday’s “Grayling Day” demonstration against legal aid cuts came from Paddy Hill, one of the Birmingham Six, who spent sixteen years in prison having been wrongly convicted of murder in 1975. It was broad attack on the political establishment, a warning about miscarriages of justice, and a call for wider action against cuts.

Instead of cutting legal aid, he said,

let’s get rid of that bunch of arseholes that’s sitting over there … if we do, we’ll have plenty of money for legal aid.

He warned about the effect of the cuts on those like him:

If I was in prison today, I would never get legal aid – I would rot in prison, even though they knew I was innocent

and later, that all the cuts would do is

give the Crown Prosecution Service and the police a free hand in court to do what they want.

It wasn’t us the public that caused the economic crisis, he said, calling for much broader action:

It was them in there, their friends in big business, and the bankers. Let’s get rid of the lot of them … You want to come out on strike for good, until we get rid of that lot and get things changed, because until then, nothing’s going to change in this country.