Annoying government

The Hammersmith Law Centre has made a near-30-year career of successfully challenging government and local government on behalf of local people. Now, the Hammersmith Law Centre is facing a 60% cut in the grant that it gets from Hammersmith and Fulham Council.

This isn't the first time that the law centre has found itself threatened with closure. This article continues interviews with people who are interested to know why the law centre is in the firing line again.

There are links to the first reports on the Hammersmith Law Centre and voluntary sector funding cuts issue at Hammersmith and Fulham at the end of this story.

Photo: Sheona York

There are certainly days when founding Hammersmith Law Centre lawyer and Law Centres Federation Chair John Fitzpatrick wonders if the centre's famed habit of confronting political nobilities led to Hammersmith and Fulham council whacking £120,000 from the centre's grant this year.

Fitzgerald, who sits on the centre's management committee and teaches at the University of Kent, isn't particularly keen to gratify anybody's thundering paranoia: on the other hand, he feels that a number of the centre's recent cases may have lost it points with whoever it is out there who keeps tabs on prospective troublemakers.

Chief among these cases was the recent and much-publicised court case of the group of nine Afghan men who hijacked a plane in 2000, and held more than 150 crew and passengers hostage in an airport standoff that went on for some days. The men argued that they took this extreme action because they had no choice and wanted to escape the Taliban. They were jailed, but freed on appeal.

It was somewhere around here that things got very difficult: the law said the men should be allowed to stay in the UK, but the public, and certainly political, view was nothing of the kind. An Immigration Appeal Tribunal ruled that the men should be granted leave to stay in the UK on human rights grounds, because they were deemed to pose no further threat to the UK, and faced real danger if they were returned to Afghanistan. It was a controversial finding in the political sense, to say the very least. Successive home secretaries have put a great deal of effort into challenging the ruling, and into questioning the right of the nine men to the discretionary leave that would allow them to work in the UK. Many members of the press and public were behind them, too: observing the human rights of hijackers was, for many people, a bridge too far.

The Hammersmith law centre represented the nine men as they went through the courts. It also represented the men when home secretary John Reid made that office's most recent attempt to impose temporary leave status on the men - a status that would have deprived those men of the right to work and left them as a burden on the state. The centre took the case on, Fitzpatrick says, because it believed – like the court of appeal and everyone else who has since ruled on the initial ruling – that the judiciary made the correct decision as far as the law went, and that the home office must observe judicial decisions, like everybody else has to. It wasn't about standing up for plane hijacking, Fitzgerald says, casting a skyward glance - it was a matter of defending the legal process, which had consistently found in favour of humanitarian protection for the hijackers and so must be observed.

The court of appeal chucked Reid's appeal out, and censured the home office besides. As well it should have, Fitzpatrick says: the home office had no business ignoring the tribunal's first findings. 'Yes, [those men] hijacked an airplane in Afghanistan, and they were put on trial and convicted of a criminal offence, [but] there was an appeal and they were successful, and the decision at that time by the immigration appeal tribunal was that they ought to be given indefinite leave to remain in this country [on human rights grounds]. And the home office refused to accept the tribunal's findings. It was a stunning rejection of a decision of a court. It was a case of real constitutional importance. '

It was also a case where politicians went after lawyers and the courts in public, and described the law and various courts as an ass: Jack Straw, David Blunkett and even Tony Blair took the unusual step of publicly criticising the judiciary for its findings, even as the judiciary was praised elsewhere for delivering a factual legal interpretation. Unfortunately, Fitzpatrick says, there can be serious fallout when you fight a popular tide in a defence of process. Since the hijackers' case, Fitzpatrick says, he has been aware of 'mutterings that the law centre acted for terrorists, you know... yes, we fear that they took that into account [when the recent decision to cut law centre funding was made].'

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History

It wouldn't exactly have been the first time there'd been mutterings about the Hammersmith law centre in backrooms of influence. The law centre, to its endless credit, has been winding persons of clout up for years.

Which is hardly surprising when you consider the point of the whole law centre exercise. The centres – there's about 60 across the UK at the moment - were set up 30 or so years ago by community-minded individuals who were keen to set up free legal advice centres to communities that nobody else much cared about. It followed that lawyers who found the concept attractive tended towards politics of a collective inclination – always a surefire way of drawing establishment lightening.

The Hammersmith law centre was set up in 1979 and was funded by a five-year Urban Aid grant. It was staffed by six people who were keen to see where the community law centre concept might go. Fitzpatrick was one of those six staff members. Sheona York - a feminist, activist and public-sector worker who since qualified as a solicitor and still works at the centre - was another.

York had been working in the civil service, but had become disillusioned - 'you were providing research for people [government ministers] who you felt didn't really want to hear it.' A community law centre, by stark contrast, gave a politically-interested young activist a chance to work closely with communities affected by the aforementioned government policy.

The idea of neighbourhood law centres began in the United States, on the back of Lyndon Johnson's Anti-Poverty Act - 'they were area and community-based initiatives,' York says, 'kind of the flavour of the time. [Our idea] was to do work that there either wasn't legal aid for, or that legal aid didn't quite fit the bill for. [We were working in] the area of legal problems that most affected the community.' Those problems included 'a huge proportion [of cases around] private-sector housing - repossession and eviction and that sort of thing. We were also representing young people who had been picked up by the police, and also parents whose children were being taken into care.'

All of which, Fitzpatrick says, made the law centres attractive. 'It was very much a grassroots movement. I was qualifying as a lawyer then and I thought, 'that's the sort of legal practice I want. The North Kensington law centre was the first [to launch] in the 1970s, and then they began to spread out - Paddington, Brent, Lambeth and so on. [There were a lot of people] who were concerned to give access to the law to people who didn't have it. Any socially-aware lawyer, or politically-aware lawyer was attracted by the thought of using their professional skills in a way that complemented their political outlook. I don't think people in law centres thought [the centres] were going to change the world, but they thought that they might improve it while they were changing the world politically. It was very much a case of working with, rather than for, people, and taking a partisan approach.'

The ground for the centres was as fertile as it had been: communities then, York says, had 'real organisation' in the form of bolshie tenants' associations, women's groups and other grassroots organisations that had genuine experience of collective power. 'There were people in those organisations who had real political aspirations, and it wasn't a foreign idea to people to think of getting together and achieving something. Say, for example, if they [a tenants' association] heard of some person suffering abuse, they would go around the perpertrator's house and just stand on the doorstep with their arms folded and tell [the perpertrator] to stop it. People would take a thing like that to the tenants' association and expect them to deal with it. They didn't want to call the police and have the police on the estate, and then have young people on the estate picked up.'

So, the law centres acted for people in disadvantaged communities. They also began to side with them. 'That sort of [sympathy for grassroots issues] was very important,' Fitzpatrick says. '[When you're working with the community], it's not just providing a legal service, but being on the side of people that you're providing a legal service for. The whole point is that the centres were participatory, pluralistic and partisan. They were managed by people who were elected and accountable. A lot of people on the (law centre's) management committee were ex-clients. It was about making sure that people had input into the direction of the service, so that you knew where the problems are and what needed addressing.'

None of which tends to thrill the authorities.

More to come soon.

Introduction to Hammersmith and Fulham voluntary sector cuts story
Report from first protest at deciding Hammersmith and Fulham cabinet meeting
New Statesman report link on Hammersmith and Fulham Tory Council
Photos from protests against Hammersmith and Fulham voluntary sector funding cuts