Two former Conservative law officers have criticised the political rhetoric against “lefty lawyers” as damaging and wrong as the head of the Law Society warned it could lead to physical attacks on immigration solicitors.
Dominic Grieve, a former attorney general, and Edward Garnier, a Conservative peer and former solicitor general, said lawyers should not be attacked for doing their jobs, regardless of who they represent or their personal views.
Senior Conservative politicians from Rishi Sunak to the party deputy chair, Lee Anderson, have blamed “lefty lawyers” for thwarting the government’s policies to prevent people crossing the Channel in small boats.
The controversy escalated this week after Conservative officials circulated criticism of Labour for having links to Jacqueline McKenzie, a partner at the law firm Leigh Day, who has represented an asylum seeker challenging their deportation to Rwanda. She has since received abuse and said on Friday that people have threatened to drown her “like an asylum seeker” and leave dead bodies at her property.
McKenzie said she was still concerned for her security. “I’ve had a security company come and take look at our house, and decide to cut down a tree because someone could be hiding in it,” she said. “I’ve had death threats from people who clearly know where I live, with all sorts of abuse including threats to drown me like an asylum seeker or leave their bodies in our driveway because there’s so much space.
“My junior colleagues have really suffered, they’re terrified of the abuse and it’s just not right that we’re doing our jobs, not as celebrities, and are having to deal with this.”
Grieve said the criticism of lawyers for representing clients who want to challenge the government on points of law was unacceptable.
“The idea of criticising ‘lefty lawyers’ – when on the face of it what they are doing is giving government a difficult time because they are raising legal issues that are legitimate – is just completely wrong. Ministers should not be doing this,” he said.
“It’s degrading of the discourse and that’s what I find so pointless. The government has many frustrations and some of them I am sympathetic to. It does not justify launching culture war attacks when they are completely misplaced.”
In the case of McKenzie, he said: “The fact she has advised the Labour party is quite irrelevant. What’s she done wrong? She’s a lawyer. As long as lawyers are acting professionally in carrying out her duties, their political views are irrelevant.”
Grieve, who sat as an independent MP after Boris Johnson withdrew the whip for defying him over Brexit, said the past few days had seen an “extraordinary week of populist pledges on a whole load of issues around immigration” and the attacks on lawyers “seems to be a spin-off”.
Garnier, a barrister and former Conservative minister, said the criticism of lawyers simply for carrying out their duties to clients was “disgusting”.
“Attacking lawyers for doing their job is dull, unproductive and unintelligent. It confuses a lawyer’s duty to represent the client and do their best for the client and whatever it is that the client themselves stand for,” he said. “I would have thought that so obvious and fundamental that it does not need public restatement but it apparently does. I understand the politics of it … but I just find it tedious and it debases public debate.”
Both Grieve and Garnier stressed that lawyers encouraging people to manufacture persecution stories in order to falsely claim refugee status, as alleged by the Daily Mail, was a separate possibly criminal matter, but this was fundamentally different from lawyers simply representing their clients.
The idea of lawyers frustrating the government’s aims was first introduced by Johnson and Priti Patel back in autumn 2020.
Lubna Shuja, president of the Law Society, said McKenzie was not the only immigration lawyer who had been threatened in the current climate and warned that physical attacks were a risk.
Shuja said there were six occasions on which Johnson and Sunak have referred to “lefty lawyers” and on each occasion, the Law Society had written to the government to say “this language is dangerous”.
She said it was important that action was taken in relation to a tiny minority of lawyers who help people make fraudulent immigration claims but stressed that the wider demonisation was “putting innocent lawyers at risk and in the firing line”.
The language of Conservative politicians and some in the media was also “undermining confidence in the legal profession and it’s undermining the justice system”, as well as distracting from the real problem of a huge asylum case backlog, she said.
“We have been contacted by other solicitors who are concerned for their own safety on the back of what’s going on,” she said. “Jacqueline McKenzie has been picked up as one of the cases but she’s not the only one. That’s a real, real concern.
“Unfortunately, it is very senior politicians making these comments. They need to reflect really seriously on the consequences of the words the are using because how long is it going to be? We’ve already had one attempted attack … I am really worried we are going to find ourselves in a position where there’s another incident. We don’t want that to happen. Solicitors and lawyers should not be associated with the causes of the clients they are acting for. They should not be put at risk for doing a job.”
