For Clement Attlee, Legal Aid wasn’t an afterthought, but the cornerstone of a just society. Just as the NHS was built on the revolutionary promise that every person deserved access to healthcare, the Legal Aid and Advice Act 1949 promised every person access to justice by funding legal representation if they couldn’t afford their own.

Attlee was a former barrister, and trained under someone Tony Blair might call an ambulance-chasing personal injury lawyer. He knew better than most that, without affordable access to justice, legal rights are meaningless for the poor, and courts become a playground for the rich. But just as the Tories’ 25 percent cuts to NHS funding since 2015 have dismantled the idea of a healthcare service equally accessible to all, the government’s cuts to Legal Aid have effectively put access to civil justice out of reach for most of the UK.

The media’s focus in this issue has largely been on cuts in the criminal justice context. It’s easy to see why. The Conservatives paint themselves (somewhat incoherently) as the party of both law and order and individual liberty. But their cuts to Legal Aid and the Crown Prosecution Service have caused rape convictions to fall by more than half and forced even defendants who win to sell their homes to pay their legal fees (including one Tory MP who voted for the cuts). There has never been a better time to do crime in modern British history – and never a worse time to be wrongfully accused.

The civil justice system is decidedly less sexy than criminal law, but its cases about government decision-making and compensation claims can be just as important. Ultimately, it’s the civil justice system which prevents wrongful deportations and protects our health from the cost-cutting of right-wing governments and big business, because it speaks the only language they understand – money.

Even personal injury law is intensely political, because it’s always been about how power should be exercised in society, and who is entitled to strike the balance between profitability and safety. As a result, like the NHS, the Tories have repeatedly attempted to strangle Legal Aid in the cradle, whether by restricting the cases covered or means testing it within an inch of its life.

In 2013, there were two key developments in the Conservative austerity justice agenda. The first was commencement of the euphemistically named Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act (LASPO). The Act all but abolished Legal Aid, excluding most cases from its scope and limiting funding for the remainder to those in extreme poverty – with the result that the number of people accessing Legal Aid dropped by 82 percent by 2018. Although the Conservatives claim to be the party of private enterprise, the Act also prevented plaintiff law firms from privately funding claims by limiting the recovery of success fees (which make it worthwhile for lawyers to take on risky cases) and after-the-event insurance premiums (which prevent plaintiffs going bankrupt paying the other side’s legal fees if they lose).

The second development came from the courts themselves. The Court of Appeal’s judgment in Mitchell v News Group ironically concerned whether a Conservative MP had called police officers ‘fucking plebs’. The decision suggested that where a party committed any breach of a procedural rule that was more than trivial (for example, filing a document late, or failing to ensure it was properly sealed), the other side had a good chance of getting sanctions applied (for example, striking out the party’s claim and winning by default).

The court thought that, by applying sanctions it admitted were draconian, it would increase access to justice. Striking out claims would encourage parties to comply with procedural deadlines, increase the speed and efficiency of court proceedings, and render them more affordable to the ‘missing middle’ of people too wealthy for Legal Aid but too poor to fund expensive litigation. Instead, its decision worked alongside Conservative cuts to bring about three consequences, which together denied people access to justice and ultimately cost more than they saved.

The first consequence was an exponential growth in the number of people representing themselves. By 2017, only 20 percent of family court cases involved two parties who both had representation; in 35 percent, neither party had any lawyer at all. Litigants in person, some of whom struggled to read or speak English, were forced to go through the labyrinthine, traumatic, and potentially bankrupting court process on their own, and then blamed if they could not understand procedural rules full of ‘coded messages’.

Countless winning claims were lost, and people denied their day in court, in the name of cost efficiency. But even by this metric the changes were a failure. In fact, self-represented litigants often end up costing the justice system more than legally-aided ones, in the time spent by judges trying to understand the litigant’s amateur attempts to present their case and hearing hopeless claims Legal Aid lawyers could have gently told plaintiffs were not worth bringing.

The second consequence was that, in their rush for procedural efficiency, the changes invited endless time-consuming procedural disputes. Before 2013, minor breaches of technical rules were frequently ignored by courts trying to find justice on merits. Now, when a multi-million pound claim can be won or lost on whether deadlines were met and forms properly sealed, every procedural hearing has the potential to become a fight to the death: wealthy parties throw endless resources into strike-out applications, precisely because the reward of winning by default is so huge. The civil justice system has become more like a game to be won by lawyers’ tactical moves, and less about which side is right.

The third consequence is that many low-value claims are effectively impossible to litigate. Because litigation is expensive, in many cases the amount a plaintiff spends on legal fees might vastly exceed the amount they are actually seeking.

Under the so-called English Rule, in most cases, the difference was made up by recovering a portion of your legal fees from the other side if you win. But LASPO’s restrictions mean that an individual plaintiff might be left out of pocket if they win, or bankrupt if they lose. On the other hand, a corporation defending wrongs committed in the course of its trade—like putting dangerous cars on the road if it thinks it will save more skimping on safety than it will pay in settlements —effectively enjoys Legal Aid irrespective of its means: its legal fees will often be tax deductible, meaning the state subsidises them by 19 percent.

In austerity Britain, civil justice is treated less like a public service and more like an export industry. If you are a Russian oligarch looking to fight out your grievances with a compatriot, or an international celebrity looking for a generous divorce settlement, the Ministry of Justice will welcome you with open arms for the VAT you pay on legal services. But for everyone else, access to justice has never been further out of reach.