LIZ Truss’s mismanagement of the criminal justice system is to blame for the current barristers’ strike, Labour’s shadow justice secretary has said.

Steve Reed told GB News: “Barristers in their gowns on their wigs are not a naturally militant group. They’ve never gone out on strike before.

“In fact, what’s going on is we have a broken criminal justice system. And Liz truss was a former justice secretary when she was in that role.

“She reduced the number of judges and sold off some of the courts, fuelling what became the biggest backlog in our courts in history – before the pandemic even started.

He added: “Liz Truss is, I’m afraid, up to her neck in the problems that have fuelled the crisis, that has now resulted in the strike that absolutely nobody wants to see.

“Dominic Raab has been invited by the Criminal Bar Association which represents barristers to sit down and have a meeting three times this year on each occasion they voted for taking action.

They invited him to sit down and meet with him and said they would not take action if he did that. He simply refused.”

Reacting, in a debate during Breakfast with Stephen Dixon and Isabel Webster, criminal barrister Shaun Wallace – who stars in ITV show The Chase, said: “Barristers don’t come into the profession simply to earn money, they come into the profession to try and help the underprivileged within society.

“Now for the last 30 or so years, there’s been a dramatic decrease in relation to the funding of criminal legal aid.

“In relation to that, especially so far as the pandemic is concerned, we’ve seen a drop [in the number of barristers] of around 23%, even further, due to the pandemic.

“And what’s sad and disappointing is that the government…has failed to engage in proper negotiations actually even with lawyers in relation of trying to come to a proper resolution to try and end the strike.

“It’s a last resort, it’s something which we haven’t taken lightly – remember, lawyers are self-employed, for us to take this dramatic step of not receiving any fees around an indefinite strike really means that it’s important to actually bring this situation to the public attention.”

Kirsty Brimelow QC, chair of the Criminal Bar Association, commented: “This has been going on for years. An independent review into legal aid was commissioned back in 2018 and eventually reported at the end of last year, and the report has been with the government for some nine months now.

“It makes very clear recommendations; it says that the criminal justice system is in crisis after years of neglect. And it makes absolutely no bones about it, that there can be no further delay.

“Yet we’re still in this position where there’s been no increase to legal aid for barristers. And also, we’ve seen barristers just leaving the profession in droves.

“And so, unless there’s action now and immediately, we won’t have a criminal bar, we won’t have a criminal justice system in the future. There must be a meeting literally tomorrow.”