Since UK immigration lawyer Jacqueline McKenzie was singled out by the ruling Conservative party, she has received a torrent of death threats, hate mail and racist abuse.
Tory party headquarters had portrayed the head of asylum and immigration at law firm Leigh Day, in a dossier it gave to selected newspapers, as a crony of Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, intent on sabotaging government plans to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda.
“I started getting emails straight away,” McKenzie, who is black, said, referring to the day earlier this month when the Express, Mail, Telegraph and Sun newspapers first published stories about her containing elements from the document.
“One said: ‘I am going to drown you’. Another: ‘I am going to cut your throat.’ Mostly it was things like: ‘Go back to where you come from’,” she said. The police are looking into the origins of the threats.
McKenzie’s experience coincided with a broader attack by members of Rishi Sunak’s government on the “lefty lawyers” they blame for challenging plans to toughen up the asylum system by challenging the Rwanda policy.
All the main legal associations rallied around her, accusing Tory politicians of fostering a threatening climate for many members of the profession. “No lawyer should be criticised, or made the subject of a targeted campaign, for doing their job,” the Law Society and Bar Council said in a rare joint statement.
Lubna Shuja, the Law Society’s president, said: “By using language like this they’re undermining the rule of law and they are undermining trust in the legal profession, the legal system and the justice system.”
McKenzie is advising the Labour party on a voluntary basis on racial equality and was previously on a panel advising the government in the wake of the Windrush scandal.
She is not part of the wider legal challenge that has held up the government’s Rwanda policy in the courts. But she did represent one asylum seeker who the government tried to deport to Rwanda last year on a flight eventually grounded by the European Court of Human Rights.
The Conservative party declined to comment on the McKenzie dossier but said: “The idea that lawyers should be exempt from criticism [was] completely wrong and incompatible with a free society.
“The profession would be better served by heeding the advice of the Lord Chancellor and not parading their politics,” it added.
Shuja said the Law Society had been contacted by numerous other lawyers who had been “receiving hate mail and are genuinely worried about their own safety”. She blamed the spike in abuse from members of the public on the “rhetoric that’s been coming out from senior politicians and from some parts of the media”.
Senior Conservative politicians have consistently railed against immigration lawyers, blaming them for standing in the way of the policies they have designed to halt record numbers of asylum seekers entering the UK on small boats via the Channel.
Speaking in the House of Commons in March, Sunak referred to Starmer, who was director of public prosecutions before switching to politics, as “just another lefty lawyer in our way”.
Around the same time, home secretary Suella Braverman blamed “an activist blob of leftwing lawyers, civil servants and the Labour party” for the government’s failure to curb small boats crossing the Channel in an email to Tory party members.
The latest broadside earlier this month came during what the government had designated “small boats” week, aimed at championing its policies on irregular migration. It also followed an expose by the Daily Mail in late July about solicitors it alleged were helping asylum seekers to falsify their claims.
In response, the Solicitors Regulation Authority closed down three firms within days. In a letter to justice secretary Alex Chalk detailing the action the watchdog had taken, Anna Bradley, the SRA’s chair, said she was “shocked by the apparent behaviour of those solicitors identified” by the Mail.
The Ministry of Justice declined to comment on the specific accusation by the legal profession that the government was helping to foster a climate of intimidation.
But referencing the action taken by the SRA, it said: “The overwhelming majority of lawyers in this country do an extremely important, valuable job,” adding: “There is a small minority that does not act in accordance with their duties, and it is absolutely right that there is a robust regulatory framework in place to hold them to account.”
Immigration lawyers worried about their safety pointed to an attack at the London office of Duncan Lewis Solicitors in 2020 as evidence they have good reason to be alarmed. It came days after Priti Patel, then home secretary, claimed that “activist lawyers” were frustrating the removal of failed asylum seekers.
“Everybody is going to be keeping an eye out,” said Alasdair MacKenzie, an immigration barrister who works at Doughty Street Chambers, Starmer’s former employer, and is on one of the teams that will be challenging the Rwanda policy at the Supreme Court in coming months.
He said what was “amazing” about the Conservative party’s willingness to brief against an individual lawyer, potentially inciting violence against her, was that “it has ceased to be amazing”.
In gunning for the profession, he said, the government had taken a leaf straight out of the populist hard right playbook of the likes of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu.
Others complained that by attacking their profession, the government had disregarded the fundamental principle that lawyers should not be associated with the causes of their clients just because they represent them.
“Some of the language is trying to set up the lawyers as the stumbling block,” said Nick Vineall, chair of the Bar Council. “But that’s misconceived; it’s the judges who apply the law, all lawyers do is represent their clients within the constraints of the law.”
