The quotation above comes from Henry VI Part II, which was one of the set texts on my O-level English literature course. At the time, I secretly wondered why we didn’t start with Part I, but didn’t like to ask, as we didn’t have too many Shakespearean texts on my bookshelves at home (in fact, now I think about it, I don’t recall any bookshelves at all). I grew up in Birmingham, which wasn’t quite Peaky Blinders, but there was enough social deprivation around for me to see first-hand what poverty looked like. I was the first person from my school to go to university (which was a surprise to some of my teachers) but Warwick University was transformative and set me on the path to social welfare law. We had strikes and demonstrations outside the classrooms (Sir Keith Joseph came to Warwick shortly after making cuts to the education budget) but inside, I learnt that law could be used as a tool for achieving social change. I still believe it can.

I think the present government believes that too, it understands the power of the law, hence the verbal assaults on lawyers over recent years. In mid-August, the Guardian compiled a timeline of Tory party attacks on lawyers.1Rowena Mason, ‘“An activist blob”: Tory party attacks on lawyers – a timeline’, Guardian, 16 August 2023. Not as murderous as Henry VI Part II’s language, but inflammatory enough to whip up ill feeling: ‘lefty lawyers’, ‘activist lawyers’, ‘lefty human rights lawyers and other do-gooders’, ‘left-wing criminal justice lawyers’, ‘ legal eagles, liberal left lawyers’, ‘anti-British activist lawyers’, ‘an activist blob of left-wing lawyers’, and not forgetting the charge of ‘abetting the work of criminal gangs’.

The compilation of a dossier on Jacqueline McKenzie, a partner at the firm Leigh Day, with a smear campaign, was a step too far. In an article Jacqueline wrote for the Guardian, she said: ‘The government has set the right-wing press on me because I have represented someone being deported to Rwanda – but I know people can see through their deception. It will backfire.’2Jacqueline McKenzie, ‘I’m an immigration lawyer, and now the target of a Braverman smear campaign. It will backfire’, Guardian, 8 August 2023. Support for Jacqueline was huge, including a joint statement from The Law Society and The Bar Council (with which LAG joins wholeheartedly) as well as an outpouring of messages from colleagues on social media.

With the remaining words of my editorial, I want to recognise the difference you make as lawyers. I have been lucky enough to meet and work with some of you, and the LALY awards brilliantly showcase the work that legal aid lawyers do. But one lawyer I have met who stands out is Alastair Logan OBE (now a LAG trustee).3To read my interview with Alastair, see November 2019 Legal Action 12. Alastair acted for Paddy Armstrong, one of the Guildford Four, whose memoir, Life after Life, starts: ‘This book is dedicated to Alastair Logan, who fought for 15 years to ensure our lives were given back to us.’

When Paddy was released at the Old Bailey, it was Alastair who was waiting behind the court building in his powder blue Jaguar. He drove Paddy through the streets of London long enough to shake off the press and deliver him to a friend’s house, where he stayed for the first few days of his release. The description in the memoir of Paddy jumping out of Alastair’s moving car, as the press chase, reads like something out of a film. Once the press interest had died down, Alastair collected Paddy and took him to his house in Guildford to get ‘his head together’. Paddy stayed for six months.

Ironically, it was the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six miscarriage of justice cases that led to the setting up of the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which, suffering from chronic underfunding, failed to investigate Andrew Malkinson’s case on two previous occasions. It was his lawyers at Appeal, a small legal charity, who had to commission their own DNA tests and also uncovered the disclosure failures of Greater Manchester Police.

All of the lawyers I have worked with have put their client first and themselves second, going above and beyond – always. Being a social justice lawyer, a legal aid lawyer – whatever you want to call us – takes courage (especially now) but most definitely a heart.

With a general election looming next year, it seems poignant to end with a quotation from Henry IV Part II (my A-level text): ‘Past and to come seems best; things present worst.’