Iraq

As we have been reporting, the Hammersmith Law Centre will lose 60% of its funding in cuts voted for by the Tory Hammersmith and Fulham Council. Thousands of poorer people in the borough will lose access to the free legal advice and representation that the centre has provided for nearly 30 years.

This site is adding interviews with people who have gone to the law centre for legal help and advice over the years. Law centre clients are often immigrants and people seeking asylum.

Below, law centre client Salah Almesaouil talks a bit about moving to London. He has been a client of the law centre for some years, and had help with Home Office and housing problems.

Salah Almesaouil is a small, witty guy from Syria who lives with his wife and eight young children in a three-bedroom council flat in a West London block called Hamlet Gardens. 'Good flat,' he says, as his four littlest kids stampede through it. 'Bit small, maybe, for ten of us living here. Bit small.'

He's not complaining about his general direction of travel, though: the UK remains a land of opportunity as far as he is concerned, and he and his kids are taking it.

His three eldest - teenagers Heba, Mohamad and Hamza - are doing well in school, particularly in the scary subjects: Heba is studying A-level chemistry, physics and maths, Mohamad, is taking A-levels in maths, applied science and computing, and Hamza is sitting GCSEs in science, double science, maths, English language and literature, RE, design and technology, history, French and Arabic.

They want to be doctors and computer engineers and that kind of thing. Almesauouil is a happy Dad.

A bit of holiday reading until we surface round the New Year: John McDonnell earlier this month on the falling Labour party membership discussed later this month. You can enjoy a few interviews with crushed and disillusioned members and ex-members of the Labour party here .

An interview with John McDonnell at Dagenham about his campaign for the Labour Party leadership so far:

First - the good news, John McDonnell says. The good news from the six months he has spent on the campaign trail through the grassroots is the enthusiasm that people are showing for socialist (let's call them non-Blairite) ideas, and the fact that they're turning out in large numbers to hear them. There was a full house here at the Barking and Dagenham Civic Centre tonight, where McDonnell talked to a GMB branch meeting about the Public Not Private campaign and the million different ways that the private sector is cheerfully ripping off the NHS, local government and any mode of public transport you care to name. 'That enthusiasm is definitely a high,' McDonnell says. 'We have a large coalition of people who are getting organised [at ground and shop level around the campaign].'

The bad news, he says, is the dire state of the Labour Party membership: this might still finish all of them. 'Everybody in the Labour Party is in a state of anxiety about the membership,' McDonnell says. He does look concerned, too, as anybody who a) feels the Labour Party should have a future and b) may shortly be trying to solicit leadership votes from the Party's fast-disappearing members might.

Before July 7