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.

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

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

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

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

Montenegro versus Crna Gora: the rival hagiographic genealogies of the new Montenegrin polity

This article examines how hero-ancestor-saints came to be drawn into contestations over heritage, economic assets, and ritual between two rival groups of Orthodox clerics and their political and entrepreneurial backers. After Montenegro's secession from Serbia (2006), pro- and anti-Serbian factions of the population have been mobilized under the banners of the Serbian Orthodox Church (SOC) and of the recently formed Montenegrin Orthodox Church (MOC). As spheres of authority are being carved out in the new polity, competing political and sacred genealogies are used to articulate the nation's descent through earlier state projects in the region. This article examines how Orthodox notions of charisma and leadership intersect with the heroic traditions of highland clans and contemporary state processes to create specific forms of authority inscribed in divine kinship gesnealogies

Miraculous democracy : political and religious power in a convent and village of South Central Romania

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo