Government proposals to cut legal aid come at a time when the benefits system is being reconfigured from the ground up: vulnerable people will pay the price as legal aid funding and free expert advice disappears.

The new Legal Aid Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill has troubling implications, according to Alice Forbess, who argues that the bill eliminates legal aid cover for areas of the law that disproportionately affect vulnerable people, including social welfare, clinical negligence, employment tribunals, special education needs and much of immigration and asylum. Particularly worrying is the fact that these drastic cuts are to be implemented alongside the Welfare Reform Bill, which will restructure the benefits system from the ground up and is expected to temporarily heighten the need for essential legal advice.

Nick Davies and journalism’s bullying culture

Polis Intern Alex Forbess reports on the latest Polis Media Agenda Talk featuring The Guardian’s Nick Davies. It seems simple: if you see a child picking on one of his classmates, a parent, teacher, or even a police officer, would intervene and tell him to stop. But investigative journalist Nick Davies says there was no such protective reaction to the raw, abusive power news kings like Rupert Murdoch can bestow upon society, let alone a playground

Redistribution dilemmas and ethical commitments: advisers in austerity Britain’s local welfare state

Situated in Cameron’s ‘austerity Britain’, this article explores contestations surrounding financial responsibility and fair redistribution in a local authority office and an NHS psychiatric hospital. Bureaucratic action is informed by simultaneously ethical and economic calculations, but to enact public good values, bureaucrats must circumvent material contingencies beyond their control. There is an ethical, even utopian, pressure upon street bureaucrats in local offices of the welfare state to deliver a fair outcome in the interests of all. At the same time, this is rendered increasingly difficult by austerity regimes which erode resources. This article examines how legal-style advice is used to handle such tensions. Advice is an interface that can convert economic value into moral legitimacy and vice versa. This ethnography explores advisers’ ‘ethical fixes’, which aim to enable the system to operate more fairly, and the new forms of inequality which, paradoxically, emerge from actions motivated by ideals of universal equality

From ‘the interview’ to Charlie Hebdo

This article is by LSE MSc student and Polis intern Alex Forbess (@AForbess) At the heart of the global debate about the attack on the French magazine Charlie Hebdo has been the question of whether there be limitations to what we say and publish, or if it is our “God-given” right to say and write whatever we want? LSE student Alex Forbes reflects from the perspective of a citizen of a country with a constitutional presumption in favour of free speech

Improving Reading Comprehension Through Prior Knowledge Acquisition Via Digital Game Based Learning

As a result of the Tennessee Diploma Project, Tennessee students must meet ACT standards in order to achieve high school graduation. However, the reading level of the ACT is beyond that of many average students enrolled in high school. The reading section of the ACT in fact, utilizes many excerpts from classic literature. Classic literature is also included on the reading lists of most school systems across Tennessee as well as the entire country. Many students are unable to connect to the characters and contexts of classic literature because they lack the necessary prior knowledge to make this type of literature meaningful. This study was designed to look at whether prior knowledge could be provided through classroom experiences in order to aid in the reading process. Research about the reading process reveals that it is an information processing cycle wherein information about new text is matched to what the learner already knows and then is processed and stored. In fact, readers with poorly organized prior knowledge may make invalid connections between prior knowledge and new material. Therefore, to supply prior knowledge to participants, they played a commercial off-the-shelf video game to gain familiarity with the genre of detective fiction and more specifically, with the characters and typical plot and settings of Victorian era detective stories. Game play was used in conjunction with meta-cognitive activities to promote transfer from playing the game to reading the literary selection. It was theorized that this prior knowledge took the form of temporary models or scaffolds and provided a temporary model of the genre and the literary elements of a particular type of literature. Since the transfer of the prior knowledge was critical, near and far transfer of the information from the video game to the literature was also examined. Although all results were non-significant, questions were raised about instructional strategies that address prior knowledge and transfer

The end of austerity? Not for the most needy

The Chancellor’s 2016 Autumn Statement spoke of the ‘end of austerity’. It also announced the government’s aim to do more for those who are ‘just about managing’. Amidst all this, one might easily miss the crucial fact that austerity has just dramatically intensified for one particularly vulnerable group of people, write Alice Forbess and Deborah James

Acts of assistance: navigating the interstices of the British state with the help of non-profit legal advisers

This paper explores everyday interactions with the British welfare state at a moment when it is attempting to shift and transform its funding regimes. Based on a study situated in the offices of two London legal services providers, it draws attention to the role of a set of actors poised between local state officers and citizens: the advisers who carry out the work of translation, helping people to actualize their rights and, at the same time, forcing disparate state agencies to “speak to one another.” Advice and governmental services providers are increasingly part of the same system, helping to correct each other’s faults. At the same time, legal advisers’ work runs counter to the state’s aims when formal legal process is used to challenge unfair legislation. The picture is neither one of a separation between state and civil society, nor is it one in which a monolithic state is ineluctably eroding the independence of the third sector. Instead, ever more complex, blurred and idiosyncratic tangles of state, business and third sector are emerging in the field of public services

Using data for campaigning journalism: Monique Villa at LSE

Polis Intern and LSE MSc student Alex Forbess reports on the latest Polis Media Agenda Talk featuring Monique Villa Data used in campaigning journalism is now essential to raise awareness on global corruption and human right violations, according to Monique Villa. She was formerly director of Reuters Media before being appointed to lead its charitable Thomson Reuters Foundation. She has programmes that seek to help NGOs and journalists to gather efficient facts on under-reported issues from women’s rights and climate change. While photos of such events can spark global interest, Villa said that data can spark debate and eventually have citizens demand action

Democracy and miracles: Political and religious agency in a convent and village of south central Romania.

This thesis investigates the strategic exercise of political and religious agency in a Romanian Orthodox convent and the village surrounding it, during the local and national elections of 2000. It examines how three groups living in an isolated river valley, Romanian peasants, Roma traders and Orthodox nuns, made use of two fields of social action newly opened by the collapse of socialism-democratic politics and religious devotion-in order to maximize their access to power and economic resources. Using archival research, oral histories, interviews and extensive participant observation, the thesis traces the political life of Horezu convent, an important estate of the Orthodox Church, over its 300-year history, focusing particularly on the socialist and post-socialist periods. It examines the shifts in the convent population and monastic ideology, relations with the surrounding village and with political authorities. Horezu convent became a focus of attention in post-socialist times when its founder, Prince Constantin Brancoveanu, was sanctified by the Orthodox Church in 1992. Linking religious and national symbolism, this sanctification was an expression of the efforts of the Church and of its allied political actors to distance themselves from associations with the socialist regime. During the socialist period, the community of nuns at Horezu had developed close relations with members of the Party elite, and they continued to rely on these connections when, after socialism's collapse, these elites re-emerged as important political actors. Whilst the convent was able to thrive thanks to its privileged political connections, local peasant workers' living standards were severely deteriorating, due to the closure of former state-owned industry in the area. Increased competition over dwindling state resources, and a growing dependency on the local political elites who controlled their redistribution exacerbated tensions, leading to a growing separation between the three local groups, Romanians, Romas and nuns