You must have a really bad accountant Chris?

Not me - someone caught out by a tax rule change and solicitors not paying up for work done. When you're a junior barrister you can't afford to be turning work down if you want to build a practice, but you often get royally shafted.

Hope you don't mind me asking but Which tax rule change is that and does it only apply to the legal profession?

I'm not the expert but it was something to do with barristers being taxed on earnings that they received and the change made it on earnings they had billed instead. It may actually have been a tax concession for junior barristers that ended after practicing for a certain number of years rather than a "rule" (and similar may apply to other professions).

My memory is sketchy but it did lose a friend a chunk of money as they would have been taxed on money they didn't actually have because they didn't receive it after clients were billed, so the advice was to write the fees off.

Sounds very similar to the cash accounting scheme that HMRC offered to small businesses for VAT accounting, but in reverse.

Its all designed in a civil servants mind to ease the problems of clients not paying bills that have been submitted as part of a VAT return and the ridiculous paperwork they expected you to follow up several quarters later as a "write-off" process to claim the VAT element back.

Not being a one for paperwork and civil service bollax I just simply used to issue a credit note the next quarter, same solution, no-one loses but no hoops to jump through - it passed at least three VAT inspections too although we never actually told them that thats what we did.

Contrary to popular belief, the criminal Bar is not well paid. I have friends who are 5 years qualified in Leeds and earning (on paper) £40k.

Of this, they lose 1/3 to chambers fees and expenses, and are taxed on the rest. They frequently work evenings and weekends preparing cases. You could earn more flogging photocopiers, in return for far less hours and without the high startup cost of university / postgraduate law school. And a fraction of the stress.

Solicitors often drag their heels about payment, meaning it can be several months (or even years) before you receive payment for the case you did. Chasing them is counter-productive, since you will not get further instructions if you are heavy-handed chasing up unpaid invoices.

The way the tax system works, you are taxed on what you have billed, not on what you have received. Meaning you are paying tax on money you have not yet seen, and might never see.

There are serious problems in the criminal law side of the legal profession. And it generally stems from the fact it is so poorly paid. Aspiring lawyers are not going to spend 5 years of their life and £40K in tuition fess to qualify into an area of law where the starting salary is £15K-£25K, and the absolute maximum that can be earned is about £50K, unless you are seriously good / experienced and get involved in 'VHCC' (very high cost cases). If you want to prosecute, you might be interested in working for the CPS. Who will pay you about £30K. In central London.

But who cares? Well...we all should. More and more work in criminal law is being done by people who are either not qualified (paralegals) or very junior solicitors and barristers who simply do not have the experience and competence to do the work they are being allocated. Innocent people are being put at risk of being found guilty, and the guilty are at risk of getting away with it.

Further, there are more and more solicitor-advocates knocking around the crown court. A few are excellent, some are good, but far too many are simply awful. If you ever have the misfortune of being a defendant, go and get a decent barrister. If you can find one, before they all remuster to an area of law that actually pays a decent wage.

Finally...if you earn over about £35K, or have more than about £10K equity in your house, you are not eligible for legal aid. Which means you have to pay all your own defence costs. And here is the galling thing - as a general rule, you don't get them back if you are found not guilty.

Agree with all of the above, law degree graduates new into the law employment market start on £15k in Leeds shuffling papers for solicitors, and thats where you'll stay (unless you pay for your own LPC) for they have a constant stream of eager applicants every year, its not a golden ticket to future riches.

Cyril 'Scapegoat' Smith. Liberal MP (nowhere near being in power) for a Lancashire mill town is given police/special branch/ MI5 protection. Coppers investigating him were told to drop it or face prosecution themselves under the official secrets act. Why was this man being protected? Realistically he was a political nobody.

Was he involved with other higher ranking child abusers who the establishment worried would be exposed if Smith was charged? I think so.

Are the authorities now exposing the Smith cover-up in the hope that the public will stop asking questions about other politicians who held real positions of power, some may still be alive today?

If the full political child abuse scandal was exposed it would probably cause the whole government to collapse.

I haven't looked into the details of the Smith case but from the reading I've done in the past the allegations I've heard about have all been about him spanking boys. I think he was working as a teacher or in some other job at a school.

While we're hyper-sensitive right now about all this. The fact is that hundreds of kids will have been spanked in schools. Many of them will have just been because the kid had been naughty. The problem though is that obviously some teachers/school workers might have also been spanking because it was something they wanted to do for their own gratification, and not just to instill discipline.

Have there been allegations of more serious child abuse aimed at Smith or is that it? If that's it, then IMO the cops at the time might have just been of the mind to kill all investigation rather than let him be brought down over something they considered bogus. If there are more serious allegations this obviously changes things, but I haven't seen anything. But I haven't been looking either.

The MP who is making a huge deal about Smith. I think he's from Rochdale, got a Slavic(?) name. While his campaigning might be completely honest and above board and he could genuinely be someone who is trying to right a wrong, there's also the possibility that he's simply using this to make a name for himself in politics. That suspicion is also arisen in me in that guy who had the famous disappearing dossier. The new campaigning MP always strikes me as being just that little bit odd and his Mrs is even more so. I know she recently came out with her own abuse tale and she's been to the police about it because her mother says she's lying. But the weird thing about her complaint is that the dates that she alleges the abuse are when she was aged 6-11 and the boy was 11-16. While it was certainly *something* if it did happen, it's not a clear case of child abuse and I don't even know how the legal system could even handle it.

The first recent allegations about Smith (came out a couple of years ago) were that he had a liking for spanking young boys. These were rebuffed by supporters including his family as a labour attempt to dirty his name to score political points. Since then far more serious allegations of satanic sexual abuse have surfaced. Some linking him to far more powerful politicians who were also alleged abusers in a Westminster paeophile ring. Channel 4 news broadcast an interview with an alleged victim who said that he was taken to Smith who told him to "suck him off". The victim was under 10 years old at the time.

I have also seen videos where claims have been made that he was acting alongside Jimmy Savile and also senior politicans including a recently deceased former Home Secretary.

Indeed. But doing the Bar Professional Training Course or Legal Practice Course does not massively improve your situation.

Only around 20% of BPTC graduates get pupillage (what you need to complete before you are a qualified barrister) and only around 35% of LPC graduates get a training contract (what you need to complete before you are a solicitor).

The former course will set you back a cool £15K, and the latter around £10K if you want to do it anywhere decent.

These hardly represent value-for-money.

One other thing to add, my eldest was completely disheartened during her time out in the real world of lawyers during the last year of her degree by the pace of the work and the pressure that your average solicitor is under to churn out the cases. Whereas in Uni they would be given a sample case and several days to prepare for a mock defence, in real life she found that your prep time for an average simple case (assault or a minor benefit fraud for instance) would often be a quick read through the file while waiting outside the court, admittedly most of what she saw were pre-trial hearings but the routine-ness of a solicitor defending someone on legal aid (as it was then) who barely knew the defendant even five minutes before a hearing and who would then be moving on to the next case immediately afterwards is what depressed her about the job - there is a huge pressure to keep the files moving across the desk and keep the meter running.

I can't figure out if you're simply naive or being deliberately obtuse.

Have a good trawl around the rlExarorl website

Although not completely unexpected, that's the most depressing confirmation I've read in ages.

Ill-informed, I'd say. Or, if he is au fait with the facts, perhaps plain thick?

Read Exaro before you flare up in unsubstantiated self-righteousness, LGJM and comment on their findings and prove me wrong in my assessment.