Hannah Evans was recently made a tenant at her chambers, 23 Essex Street. But, she told Friday’s “Grayling Day” demonstration on Friday,

clouding the entire experience was the knowledge that I might not be able to do the job I love for very long at all.

She expressed her concern about the diversity of the bar after the government’s legal aid cuts, and about its very future,

The bar will be destroyed from the bottom up, and with the destruction of the bar comes the destruction of the criminal justice system

She made the connection between the financial difficulties young barristers face, and what she fears will be systemic collapse:

We know the system, and we know how it will buckle. We care passionately about upholding it, that’s why we are all here today and not at court. It’s not about the money, though I for one am unashamed to ask for a fair wage for the work that I do.

Laura Janes of the Howard League for Penal Reform spoke at London’s “Grayling Day” demonstration on Friday, about cuts to prison legal aid specifically.

Mr Grayling has removed most prison law work from legal aid entirely

she said.

That means mothers cannot get legal help to remain with their babies inside prison; that means that people who are eligible to move to open conditions … will face the parole board alone; that means that children who have been granted early release because they have made great progress will not be able to get out of jail, because they have got no to go to, and no lawyer to help them get a home and make a fresh start.

She attacked Chris Grayling’s attitude to prisoners, and what she clearly sees as his complacency:

Mr Grayling says quite clearly that he does not believe they should have access to legal aid for no other reason than that they are prisoners … he says that children and mentally ill prisoners can rely on the complaints system despite overwhelming evidence that it is not fit for purpose

She also mentioned judicial review proceedings currently being pursued by the Howard League against these cuts.

At Friday’s “Grayling Day” demonstration in London, chairman of the Criminal Bar Association Nigel Lithman QC told the audience that

an indispensable part of our democracy is the criminal justice system. It’s taken centuries to build; it is taking this government a blink of an eye to demolish.

It’s difficult, he said,

to imagine how any more damage can be done to this system; and the whole system is in revolt as to what is happening. To destroy one part of the legal system may be regarded as a misfortune; to destroy all of them looks like carelessness.

He attacked the Ministry of Justice, which he said was “inept”, “not fit for purpose” and “an embarrassment”. In contrast he said the criminal bar was “the most restrained” profession in Britain.

For us to take to the streets and close the courts – all cannot be well.

He also hinted at the justification for further action:

We are being shown no good will. So we will respond – and we too will show no good will.

Outside the Ministry of Justice on “Grayling Day” on Friday I spoke to Russell Fraser, a third six pupil at 1 Pump Court, about why he’s opposed to the government’s legal aid policy.

He mentioned what he called the

discriminatory and arbitrary residence test

for civil legal aid, which he said must be looked at again – and he mentioned the judicial review for which permission has been granted.

But he’s mainly concerned about the overall impact on justice of the government’s cuts, and especially in criminal law.

It’s not about fees … it’s more about what sort of pressures will result on the lawyers concerned … it means that the clients involved won’t get the dedication and devotion to their cases that they ought to get … we will see more miscarriages of justice; we will see more appeals, and people going free who may be guilty, and vice versa.

He queried the government’s financial justification

The spend is nothing like what the government say it is. It relies on an inflated figure which is from to or three years ago. The criminal budget continues to fall.

and picked up Subashini Nathan’s point about the amount the government spends on instructing barristers in its own cases.

Finally, he offered a proposal of his own, taking account of the international success of the commercial and chancery courts:

Why not put a levy on each of those cases that go through the Rolls Building, a small levy – and put it into legal aid?

Janis Sharp, mother of Gary McKinnon, was another of the impressive non-legal speakers yesterday.

When that knock comes to your door,

she said

everyone thinks it won’t be me, but one day, it can be …

it’s a relief, she told the audience, to find that a solicitor will take your case. She attacked the proposed legal aid cuts in principle

To find out that lawyers in the future will be offered financial incentives to have a quick guilty plea, is so, so wrong

and it terms of their effects

when someone’s in trouble, and they walk round to their high street solicitors – they won’t be there. They walk round the corner to another – they won’t be there.

She may have had Sadiq Khan in mind (he’d spoken shortly before) when she said

This is not party political, because the cuts started in 1997, and have continued through both governments

and she finished with a warning for politicians:

There’s an election coming up. We want it in stone – this has to change – and we’ll think about who we elect, and it will depend on equal rights.

Once the speeches ended at yesterday’s “Grayling Day” demonstration, I caught up with one of the protesters who heckled Sadiq Khan MP: pupil barrister Claire Mawer. She explained to me why she was unhappy with him.

Labour, she said

laid the foundations for the destruction of the legal aid system

by the cuts they made. What made that even worse, for her, is that some of those responsible as Labour ministers – including Sadiq Khan – had themselves been legal aid lawyers. She told me

I find it insulting for Sadiq Khan to stand up and declare support for us, when he is probably the reason why we’re here in the first place.

Labour, she said

failed categorically to support us while they were in power.

In answer to a question I put, she said Labour hadn’t been clear enough about what legal aid cuts it will restore, if elected next year – and which it will accept. It hadn’t escaped her notice that Sadiq Khan has not always sounded opposed in principle to legal aid cuts.

I doubt Claire Mawer is alone in wanting more from Labour. Indeed, similar concerns have been raised by Paul Mendelle QC, who I interviewed last year.  I doubt either of them will get much more in terms of financial commitment, realistically. But if that’s so, then they’re at least entitled to clarity. As I wrote last summer,

I want honesty from Labour. It’s reasonable for them to oppose the detail of Chris Grayling’s proposals, their timing and their full scale, while accepting much of their broad thrust and principle, and not proposing to completely reverse them. …

What’s not reasonable is for Labour to give the impression of being fully in agreement with … “Save Justice” demonstrators – most of whom are not, I reckon, minded to accept any significant criminal legal aid cuts – if they know that, in power, they’d accept many of the cuts being made now, or would make broadly similar cuts of their own, on a broadly similar scale.

There’s bound to be increasing demand for Labour to spell out its own detailed plans for legal aid, as 2105 gets nearer.

In a short speech at yesterday’s “Grayling Day” in London (even less than the three case-managed minutes he allowed himself), the former Court of Appeal judge Sir Anthony Hooper told the demonstration that

For some sixty years, everyone has had the right to equal access to justice … This government is destroying that right.

He also reminded the audience that in very high cost criminal cases (VHCCs), there’s been a 44% cost reduction in since 1997.

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.

Shadow Lord Chancellor Sadiq Khan MP has a slightly rougher ride than he might have hoped for at today’s demonstration against legal aid cuts. Although his speech was broadly well received, for the first time at one of these rallies I heard him heckled by not one, but at least three protestors.

Would he, his introduction asked, give an unequivocal commitment to overturn any legal aid cuts? That of course would be impossible for any Labour spokesman to do; and unsurprisingly, no answer came.

He began with an attack on his ministerial opposite number.

When you have blind ambition plus wilful ignorance, you have Chris Grayling

he said to cheers, and of all Lord Chancellors Grayling was, he said, “the most legally illiterate in a thousand years”. Here, Khan said

is a man who thinks the Magna Carta is a bottle of champagne

A good line which I hadn’t heard before.

He laid into the entire government, too, saying

it’s been a mission of David Cameron and Nick Clegg, over the last four years, to deny ordinary people access to justice

and that the government had shown a “pattern of behaviour”:

They’re changing the way we do judicial review, they’ve changed “no win, no fee”, they’re attacking our human rights law, and they’re attacking legal aid.

But as he began to address the financial scale of the cuts –

first they cut £350m from civil legal aid – a third of the civil legal aid budget – and now a quarter of the criminal budget

– some of the audience seemed to lose sympathy with him, and began to attack Labour’s own record. You can hear a woman protester shouting

Your government did the same!

and ask, in a reference to the former Labour justice minister,

What about Geoff Hoon?

I’m pretty sure I heard two women on either side of me making comments about Labour – and you hear at least one male voice, too, shouting

What about you?

and, at the end, booing.

I am with you, and we will defeat them

said Sadiq Khan. But I wonder to what extent the audience were really with him.

Of course it’s understandable that Labour spokesmen should want to attack the government over legal aid while making as few specific spending pledges as they can. Ed Balls’s fiscal plans leave them little room to restore the cuts this government makes. But I sensed that quite a few of today’s audience wondered what Sadiq Khan’s attacks on Chris Grayling really added up to, in the end.

One of today’s best speeches, and certainly the most interesting politically, came from the former Conservative MP Sir Ivan Lawrence QC.

He reminded the audience that he’s been 60 years a Conservative, and 52 of them a barrister, but in that time

never has there been a demonstration like this.

It is “atrocious” he said, that the government has “forced” lawyers to take action.

All my life I have been against strikes, against industrial action that hasn’t been justified – but this industrial action is justified.

He said politicians had seen the legal profession as an easy touch:

we have been walked over year after year as our incomes have been cut, as the criminal justice system has been threatened, because the government has had nothing to fear about us.

But now, he said,

we are going to make them frightened of our resolve today, frightened of our determination to stop them destroying the criminal justice system which my party has held so dear, the party of law and order which has built up the reputation of this great country for its respect for rule of law.

Sir Ivan is an interesting figure: no left-winger, but an (in the best sense) old-fashioned “law and order” Conservative of a type we hear too little from, these days.