Legal aid cuts will wreck lives and increase inequality  The
Tory spending cuts are based on ideology, not sound economics.
This is becoming more and more clear as the scope of the cuts
are revealed. Recent revelations in the Tories’ plans to
increase the tuition fee cap to £9000 per year will block
hundreds of thousands of potential students from attending
university, particularly the elite universities which already
have a disproportionate number of students from private and
public schools.  The latest cuts to be announced are to the
legal aid system. Ken Clarke announced this week that the Tories
plan to slash £350m a year from the legal aid bill. The legal
aid system is already critically underfunded; it was neglected
by Labour and is now being destroyed by the Tories.  There
hasn’t been an increase in spending on legal aid in more than 10
years, whilst costs including inflation have soared. This
amounts to a real-term 25% cut in spending over the last 10
years. Further cuts won’t just restrict access to