Solicitors are instruments of justice

This week was billed in advance by the government as 'small boats week'. On the evidence so far, the real title is ‘blame the lawyers week’. 

What better way to deflect attention from your own shortcomings as a government (a gigantic asylum backlog at the Home Office, and enormous hotel bills for housing the backlog) than to stir up feelings against someone else … who else can we blame? … this week, lawyers!

So on Tuesday 8 August, two days into the week, both the Daily Express and the Daily Mail put lawyers in the frame with blaring front page headlines inspired by government policy: ‘Tory fury as lawyers block migrants on barges’ (Express) and: ‘Suella: I’ll wage war on crooked migrant lawyers’ (Mail). The Mail story said that the home secretary ‘announces new taskforce to root out rogue firms with those found guilty of fraud facing LIFE in jail’. In fact, the article itself says that the supposedly new taskforce has been operational for some months.

That was Tuesday.

The day before, on Monday 7 August, in an interview on Radio Four’s ‘Today’ programme, Sarah Dines MP, the parliamentary under-secretary of state for safeguarding of United Kingdom, who is herself listed as a family law barrister at 3 Paper Buildings, launched the government’s ‘blame the lawyers week’ by continuing with the long-term smear against ‘lefty lawyers’ … or indeed any lawyer not signed up to every detail of the government’s policy.

She is, remember, a lawyer herself, and complained that lefty lawyers are trying to stop legal deportations at every stage.

It followed a weekend of presumably co-ordinated government attacks on our profession.

Robert Jenrick, minister for immigration, wrote a piece for the Sun on Sunday 6 August with its first line reading: ‘Sir Keir Starmer faces serious questions about his links with charities and lawyers who have campaigned to thwart our work to stop the boats’. He went on to say: ‘Today we learn that a top lawyer who advised Labour on anti-racism policies is at the forefront of efforts to stop people being deported to Rwanda.’

Nothing illegal was alleged, and the top lawyer was not actually named in the piece. If you want to amuse yourself amid otherwise degrading mud-slinging, you can watch Robert Jenrick refuse to answer several questions after being repeatedly challenged to name the person.

I feel cheapened just trying to describe these attacks. If you want to read what the top lawyer said in reply, giving the facts of who she is and what she does, read here. It gives a rather different picture.

That was not all for this particular weekend. The home secretary also trailed her Tuesday story about immigration lawyers who submit false asylum and human rights claims for migrants being jailed – maybe for life.

The general election is not for another year or so. This is the silly season. We should be alarmed, though, that we are such ready material for the silly season. We need to be prepared for more sustained attacks in the future, when parliament returns and the party conference season begins.

The answer is not to do what the vice-chair of the Bar did when the Daily Mail ran its sting operation on immigration lawyers at the end of July, and the prime minister made his reprehensible comment about how the Labour Party and a subset of lawyers and criminal gangs are all on the same side.

The Bar’s vice-chair railed about the prime minister playing politics with the legal profession, about his uttering damaging rhetoric that undermines the rule of law, trust in lawyers, confidence in the UK legal system, and so on.

Of course the Daily Mail loved that. It played right into its hands. It was able to run a front page splash the next day headed ‘What Planet are they on?’, with an article about ‘Fury as the Bar Council attacks Rishi Sunak after the Prime Minister criticised immigration lawyers exposed by the Mail as trying to help migrants falsely claim asylum’. For good measure, the newspaper also ran an attack article on the vice-chair (‘Leading barrister who attacked Rishi Sunak for condemning crooked asylum lawyers has stood TWICE to be a Labour MP’.

We need to be cleverer than that if we are not to be bested by the never-ending alliance between the government and the feral press, who toss us between themselves for sport.

My view is that we need to brand ourselves more strongly in the public mind, a long-term project. My own suggestion is that we need to be seen as ‘instruments of justice’. Solicitors are instruments of justice. To deal with the attacks which have rained down on us over recent years – for instance, involving SLAPPs, climate change, NDAs in cases of sexual harassment, tax evasion – we need to have a second strap-line, saying ‘And if clients’ interests conflict with justice, justice wins’. The preamble to the SRA’s principles already makes this clear, and so I am not inventing a new regulatory standard.

Such a slogan will not win the war against smears overnight. But it will help give us a line – actually two lines – which promote a positive message and deal upfront with those cases where justice is breached.

The Law Society does an excellent job, and has several projects under way to promote our brand. But we are in unprecedented territory. I cannot recall a time when solicitors were maligned so regularly by a government, in order to gain easy political benefit for itself – and where kicking solicitors like a football is seen as great sport, providing political benefit.

How did we get here? However it was, we cannot allow it to continue. My contribution to the fightback consists of 5 words followed by 9 words: Solicitors are instruments of justice. And if clients’ interests conflict with justice, justice wins.

Jonathan Goldsmith is Law Society Council member for EU & International, chair of the Law Society’s Policy & Regulatory Affairs Committee and a member of its board. All views expressed are personal and are not made in his capacity as a Law Society Council member, nor on behalf of the Law Society