What have the Conservatives got against left-wing lawyers like me? Boris Johnson told the Commons recently that the government was ‘protect[ing] veterans from vexatious litigation pursued by lefty lawyers‘. It was far from the first time lawyers had been targeted.
The Home Office’s most senior civil servant conceded last summer that officials should not have used the phrase ‘activist lawyers’ in a video blaming them for disrupting the asylum system. But it seemed that the Home Secretary didn’t get the message.
A few weeks later, Priti Patel claimed that ‘removals (of illegal migrants) continue to be frustrated by activist lawyers’. At the Conservatives’ virtual party conference, Patel then vowed to stop ‘endless legal claims’ from people who are refused asylum, accusing ‘traffickers’ and ‘lefty lawyers’ of ‘defending the indefensible’.
So impressed was the Prime Minister that he, too, joined in the verbal attacks on ‘lefty human rights lawyers‘, telling delegates that the criminal justice system was being ‘hamstrung’ by them.
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