Political attacks on “lefty lawyers” risk coarsening political debate and could lead to the abuse of more legal professionals, the head of Britain’s barristers has said.
Nick Vineall KC, the chair of the Bar Council, said the Conservative party had crossed a line by releasing a dossier criticising Labour for its links to Jacqueline McKenzie, a partner and immigration lawyer at Leigh Day who has represented people challenging asylum decisions.
After the circulation of the dossier, McKenzie said she had been subjected to abuse including threats to drown her “like an asylum seeker” and to leave dead bodies at her property.
The Conservative party said in response that lawyers should not be “exempt from criticism” and hit out at those it said had engaged in “abusive late legal challenges to frustrate removals”.
Vineall said Tory attacks on McKenzie were “very ill-judged” and she had not done anything wrong in carrying out her work representing clients.
“Obviously, lawyers are not above criticism and if lawyers misbehave they should be criticised, but that isn’t what was happening,” he said. “What happened is that a dossier was put together to try to rubbish somebody based on [that person’s] own political position and it’s that which I think crosses a line and is not acceptable.”
He said she had very strong support from within the legal profession and that in releasing a dossier about McKenzie to newspapers, Conservative party headquarters was “doing by the back door what is recognised would not be appropriate to do through the front door, which I think is really pretty unattractive”.
Vineall said the legal profession had strongly challenged government figures who had attacked “lefty lawyers” and he felt the situation had improved over the past few months until the release of the dossier.
Asked whether he was worried that such language could lead to the abuse of immigration lawyers, Vineall said: “I think ultimately it is a danger and I have seen what Jacqueline McKenzie has said. I think what really is a problem is you get a coarsening of debate and the coarsening of language on social media platforms.
“Something said either on behalf of the government by CCHQ or something said occasionally by ministers can get amplified and distorted further. I feel people in a position of responsibility have a responsibility to use moderate language.”
Vineall pointed out the “very unfortunate coincidence in timing” of criticism of some immigration lawyers behaving improperly, after they were alleged by the Daily Mail to have coached asylum seekers to make up backstories of abuse.
“It is really important for the legal profession to make clear that this is improper behaviour. That is in one category,” he said. “In another category is lawyers who behave completely properly and professionally, who may have political affiliations, but to suggest that everything they do is motivated by a political agenda is straightforwardly wrong.
“At the moment there is a focus on immigration lawyers because the government is very focused on the Illegal Migration Act. It’s a topic on which, putting it mildly, views differ. Lawyers should be entitled both to act in the course of their profession for clients within the constraints of the law, and they should be entitled to hold and express political views.”
Senior Conservative politicians, from Rishi Sunak to the deputy chair, Lee Anderson, have blamed “lefty lawyers” for thwarting the government’s policies to prevent people from crossing the Channel in small boats.
Lubna Shuja, the president of the Law Society, said last week that 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 Boris Johnson and Sunak had referred to “lefty lawyers”, and on each occasion the Law Society wrote to the government to say the language was “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 Tory 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 huge asylum case backlog, she said.
