Dinner in the great hall was over, grace had been said, we had taken our leave of the other diners with a little bow and were now sitting at a horseshoe-shaped table in a room reserved for benchers. The man on my right, another layman among the lawyers at Lincoln’s Inn, pushed a decanter of port towards me, sliced a pear in half and told me about his life.
Born in India more than 80 years ago, he came to Britain when he was in his teens, went to university in Scotland, worked as a business journalist for a while and gave it up to start buying and selling companies himself. When he left India he had vowed never to return because of the cruelty and injustice of the caste system and, although he later made his peace with the country when he took his family there for a three-month tour, his heart belonged elsewhere.
“When I was living in Scotland, I realised that I loved England. I still do. There is no other country that’s so tolerant and kind,” he said.
It was a touching sentiment, poignant even, not least because while we were speaking, a Boeing 767 was preparing to take off at a military airbase near Salisbury with the first asylum seekers bound for Rwanda. The flight never left the base because of a last-minute injunction from the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
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Earlier, as we sat beneath GW Watts’s giant fresco A Hemicycle of Law-givers — which shows Moses, Pythagoras, Charlemagne and King Alfred the Great laying down the law — I sought an opinion from a distinguished QC. I wanted to know if Boris Johnson’s Bill to unilaterally scrap the Northern Ireland protocol and his scheme to remove asylum seekers to Rwanda were illegal.
“The first certainly. The second possibly,” he said.
Brexit wars reignite / Will the cost of living keep rising?
The rising cost of living is the most immediate issue facing governments all over the world. The Central Statistics Office reports Inflation at a 40-year high, but is the worst yet to come? UCC Economist Seamus Coffey and Irish Times Political Correspondent Jennifer Bray join Pat Leahy to discuss what to expect economically and politically over the coming months. But first, Pat is joined by London Editor Denis Staunton and David O’Sullivan, Director General of the International Institute of International and European affairs to talk about the Northern Ireland Protocol bill which was introduced by the UK government earlier this week.
That QC was not among those who had acted for the asylum seekers who were taken off the flight but some of those who did have been subjected to death threats. Bar Council chairman Mark Fenhalls accused the government of bullying them and asked the prime minister to apologise for allegedly accusing them of “abetting criminal gangs”.
Lincoln’s Inn — one of four Inns of Court alongside the Inner Temple, the Middle Temple and Gray’s Inn — is part of the ancient infrastructure of English justice that stretches southwards from Holborn, past the Courts of Justice on the Strand and the Old Bailey a couple of streets east of them and down to the river. The narrow streets are lined with legal outfitters selling sober suits as well as wigs and gowns, legal stationers and legal printers, watchmakers, jewellers and wine bars.
Many of today’s lawyers work in purpose-built chambers dating from the late 17th century, and some of the pubs they drink in go back even further. The Seven Stars has been on Carey Street since 1602 and, under the management of its landlady, Roxy Beaujolais, for the past 30 years, it remains one of the best and busiest bars in London.
Carey Street was long known as Queer Street because the bankruptcy court was there and money (or the lack of it) is again the talk of the district today. Criminal barristers are being balloted this week on what action to take over the government’s refusal to increase the meagre fees paid for legal aid work.
As in Ireland, legal aid fees are often so low that it is impossible for barristers to survive on them, and in London the fee for a hearing is sometimes lower than the cost of the train ticket to get to court. Unpaid fees add to the misery, and criminal barristers have lost patience with the government’s refusal to listen to independent recommendations for rates to be increased.
Since April, criminal barristers have operated a “no returns” policy, refusing to accept cases that are returned by colleagues who have a diary clash. One option on this week’s ballot paper is to escalate that action to include all new cases, although they would continue to work on cases they have already accepted.
Ian Burnett, the lord chief justice, told a House of Lords committee that the government’s refusal to increase legal aid fees is, along with the coronavirus pandemic, one of the main reasons for the backlog of cases in the courts.
“The legal profession, both solicitors and barristers, reduced in number because there was not as much work to be done, and it also reduced because of the serious attrition on remuneration rates that came through legal aid,” he said.
A criminal court judge told me that at least 80 per cent of the defendants who came before her depended on legal aid but the fees were so low that most young lawyers were going elsewhere.
“It’s destroying the criminal bar,” she said.
“If my daughter told me she wanted to become a criminal barrister, I’d tell her not to do it — she has no hope of making a living.”