The UK Law Society and the UK Bar Council spoke up against comments made by the home secretary and the prime minister
Legal bodies in the UK have spoken up against the ‘lefty lawyer’ comments made by home secretary Priti Patel and Prime Minister Boris Johnson this week, according to the Law Society Gazette.
Patel had attacked the UK’s asylum system at a virtual Conservative party conference on Monday, saying that in the next year, she would introduce legislation to slow the influx of claims from those who had been denied asylum.
“For those defending the broken system – the traffickers, the do-gooders, the lefty lawyers, the Labour Party – they are defending the indefensible. And that is something I will never do,” Patel said.
The government was anticipating legal backlash with the major overhaul to the asylum system, she said, as those “well-rehearsed in how to play and profit from the broken system will lecture us on their grand theories about human rights.”
Johnson doubled down on Tuesday, saying in his keynote speech to the Conservative party conference that the government needed to stop “the whole criminal justice system from being hamstrung by what the home secretary would doubtless and rightly call the lefty human rights lawyers and other do-gooders.”
The Law Society of England and Wales and the UK Bar Council were among those who criticised these comments.
The Law Society said that Patel’s words undermined “a legal system which has evolved over many centuries, which helps ensure that power is not abused and that – where there are legal questions to be decided – citizens have access to legal advice and recourse through the courts, and will receive a fair hearing, no matter how their case is perceived publicly or by government.”
Law Society President Simon Davies added that a lawyer acting on behalf of an asylum seeker does not make them a “lefty lawyer.”
“It simply makes them a lawyer,” he said. “Slinging insults at lawyers undermines the rule of law in an area where views are already hotly held on all sides and risks leading not just to verbal abuse but to lawyers being physically attacked for doing their job.”
Davies said that the organisation had long advocated for the improvement of the asylum and immigration system in the UK, which he said is “beset with delays and poor decision-making.”
“Attacks on members of the legal profession for doing their jobs do our country no credit. Government ministers must be unequivocal in their support for the rule of law,” he said.
Davis said that the prime minister’s language was “divisive” and “serves nobody”; rather, it “puts lawyers and their clients at risk.”
“All solicitors advise their clients on their rights under the laws created by parliament. Legal rights cannot be rewritten through rhetoric,” he said.
Bar Council chair Amanda Pinto QC echoed Davis’s sentiments, and said that she was shocked and troubled that Johnson “condones and extends attempts to politicise and attack lawyers for simply doing their job in the public interest.”
“Lawyers – including those employed by the government itself – are absolutely vital to the running of our grossly under-funded criminal justice system. Their professional duty is to their client and to the court, and not to play political games,” she said.
Pinto said that attempts to brand lawyers with the “lefty” label sought to “demonise the very people helping constituents every day, without agenda, simply because they provide a vital public service.”
“It is not the job of lawyers to limit parliament’s own laws in a way that the government of the day finds most favourable to its political agenda. The law, not politics, is what matters to a profession that upholds the rule of law,” she said.
