‘Justice, what justice?’: Years of savage cuts have broken the system

How, asks Steve Boggan, could ‘the party of law and order’ have inflicted so much damage on the justice system, the police, the legal profession – and what, specifically, are they going to do to fix them?

A statue of Lady Justice on top of the Old Bailey, England’s criminal court in the City of London (Getty/iStock/The Independent)

When, after a two-year struggle to clear his name, Pawel Uczciwek stepped from the dock a free man, words of vindication ringing in his ears, he should have felt more elated – more relieved – than this.

He had suffered death threats, public humiliation and social media-shaming when he was wrongfully accused of a racially motivated hate crime. He had become used to people at work treating him with suspicion and to long sleepless nights bedevilled by stress and anxiety.

He had imagined the worst outcome – a two-year prison sentence. Instead, his innocence was proclaimed loudly, unambiguously, by his trial judge, Rajeev Shetty, at Blackfriars Crown Court in central London. Yet, still, this did not feel like justice.