My Saturday morning was unusual by any standard. I was followed on social media by journalists from the Sun and the Daily Mail within minutes of each other, then soon after had a call from the Telegraph and an email from the Express. All advised that they were writing a story about me and wanted to give me a right to reply. I immediately thought this to be a government-inspired hit job because of my work supporting victims of the Windrush scandal. I didn’t imagine it could be anything else. Two of the journalists explained that they’d been sent a dossier about me from Conservative party HQ, which had either deliberately or inadvertently been attached to an email.
I thought back to examples of this kind of thing in history, such as the horrors of McCarthyism, or the practices of eastern European intelligence units in the Soviet era. It was hard to fathom that someone like me – who lives for work, and who climbed mountains to become a lawyer, including giving birth on the day of an exam – could attract such ire. To my surprise, there was no mention of my Windrush cases at all – these have accounted for 90% of my work in the past five years. Windrush was a scandal created by the Conservative government, but one that it has profusely apologised for, and has promised to make amends for via a compensation scheme and other measures.
During my time representing Windrush victims, I was invited to be on the then home secretary Priti Patel’s Windrush working group, attended numerous meetings with the Home Office and sat on the Windrush lessons learned review, set up by Sajid Javid when he was home secretary. It was initially surprising that their deep dive could have missed this – until I realised that the hit job on me wasn’t about Windrush per se, but actually an attack on Labour.
So what was in the dossier on me? Someone had drawn a diagram linking Keir Starmer to anyone who challenged the Conservatives’ Rwanda plan. There was mention of a case in which I represented a Jamaican man who had lived in the UK from the age of nine and was facing deportation. It said that I was a hired adviser on race to Starmer, when in fact I am an unpaid volunteer on a working group set up by Labour to look at race disparities across a number of indicators, just as the Conservatives did with the Sewell report.
It also “outed” me as a trustee of Detention Action, a well-respected NGO supporting people in immigration detention centres, presumably because the organisation challenged the Rwanda scheme in the courts. The dossier did not mention that I had become a trustee after that challenge. I did represent a man who was one of seven shackled on the tarmac waiting to be flown to Rwanda before the flight was grounded by the courts. I feel no shame: a doctor in the immigration detention centre confirmed that my client displayed signs of being a victim of torture.
There is no doubt this story was timed to accompany the moving of asylum seekers, many traumatised, on to the Bibby Stockholm. The government attacks vulnerable people and those like myself, who represent them in order to distract from issues that the electorate prioritise: the cost-of-living crisis, the environment and the NHS.
The hit job on me was vile and self-serving, and put me and those close to me at considerable risk of physical harm. I’m having to take security advice and precautions, such is the seriousness I place on ominous emails I have received.
This flagrant attack on me and my work, built on misinformation and mischaracterisation and underpinned by racism and misogyny, is a dark day for our political sphere. It represents a serious slur on the integrity and independence of thousands of hardworking and upstanding lawyers. The positive, however, is that millions of people in the UK see the behaviour of this arm of the ruling party as unacceptable. Judging by the vast amount of support I’ve received, not only from friends and colleagues, but from many strangers too, this government hit job has spectacularly backfired.
Jacqueline McKenzie is a partner and head of immigration and asylum law at Leigh Day
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