'What's wrong with rights?' Michael Mansfield QC interview

For 30 years Michael Mansfield QC has been fighting the underdog's corner in court. But now legal aid cuts are forcing his chambers to close – and he's furious about it

'I think the average person doesn't believe what they’re being told by the politicians' … Michael Mansfield QC. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

It's unusual for someone to be famous for his ability to do something few of us have ever actually seen him do. For 30 years Michael Mansfield QC has been making headlines, representing striking miners, the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four, Barry George, and the families of Stephen Lawrence, Jean Charles de Menenez, Hillsborough victims and Bloody Sunday casualties. Only those who have watched him at work in a courtroom will know how he has pulled off so many astonishing successes, but to most on the left, he is a radical hero, the fearless champion of underdogs, human rights and civil liberties. Until now, the worst the right had been able to throw at him were accusations of champagne socialism and grandiose self-regard.

But all that changed last month, when the chambers he co-founded 29 years ago accepted its final briefs. Ninety-five per cent of Tooks chambers' work is publicly funded, and the coalition's cuts to legal aid have put it out of business. "Of all the justice ministers we've had, Chris Grayling has been the most intransigent on this issue," Mansfield says – and so the process of winding down has begun, and by the new year the chambers will have closed its doors for good.

"Emotionally, it's been the most difficult six months. Here I am trying to continue doing publicly funded work, and fight the cuts by writing articles and going on demonstrations and all the rest of it, and at the same time facing a situation in which we can't go on as an entity. I was not expecting at this age to have to come back out of semi-retirement, and basically I've got to start all over again. I could simply practise from my kitchen, I could survive without the aggravation, and just say tough cookie – but I don't want to," he says indignantly, "because that's what they want us to do. They want us to evaporate."

So next year he will open a new "virtual" chambers. Dispensing with the costs of large, central London premises and staff, the Mansfield chambers will function as an electronic hub, its barristers working remotely, hot-desking in a small shared office when necessary.

Having never met Mansfield before, I'd expected to hear him make the case against the cuts in the cool, forensic tone of a veteran QC. I don't know what he's like in court, but in person I could not have been more wrong. At 73, Mansfield is an imposing colossus of a man, and we meet at the end of a day he has spent in court representing Mark Duggan's family at his inquest – yet at moments he can get so worked up that he sounds more like a lefty student activist.

Everyone agrees that a democratic society should ensure equality before the law for every citizen. "But we've come so far away now," he despairs, "from providing equal access to basic things – civil rights to do with the criminal arena, and to do with the civil arena, housing, employment, discrimination, all those kind of things." Supporters of the cuts would argue precisely the opposite – that the current system has deviated wildly from first principles, because too many people want to go to court over all manner of complaints at the taxpayers' expense. In an increasingly rights-based culture, moral hazard has corrupted the system, because with no risk of personal cost, too many of us figure we might as well give court a go.

"But there is no evidence to suggest that frivolous pursuits of justice," he insists. "To constantly go on as they do about, you know, frivolous cases – well that might be a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of cases." More importantly, he goes on, our current legal aid bill of around £2bn a year isn't actually too high at all.

"One of the supreme court judges has pointed out that the cost of legal aid would keep the NHS going for one week. I mean, let's have a look at the national debt, let's have a look at the deficit. Let's have a look at the kind of money spent in Afghanistan and on the Iraq war. So I'm saying, yes, £2bn sounds a lot, but on the one hand, actually for a population of the size we have, it isn't. And on the other hand, what's wrong with a rights culture?"

I think Grayling would find that easy to answer – he'd say it's not fair for the Tooks chambers' cleaner to work hard and pay taxes in order for a prisoner, say, to take any old grievance to court.

"Just because you're locked up doesn't mean to say you don't have any rights. For example, if it's a question of parole, you may need to have proper representation in order to deal with that. I think you should be entitled to that." Plenty of people, I point out, might wonder why their taxes should be spent on helping convicted criminals get out of prison. "I think, funnily enough, the cleaner would understand, because the cleaner might well have, as we all might, friends who've ended up inside and have this difficulty of the labyrinthine situation of trying to find when am I eligible for release? What is it they need to know about me? What have I got to do?"

 

Michael Mansfield (right) with Neville and Doreen Lawrence, parents Stephen, in 1999. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

The cleaner might agree, but nevertheless still feel this is a service we can no longer afford. "I've already dealt with the £2bn," he scoffs impatiently. "It's peanuts compared to what they're spending! It's the cost of a bonus in the city." But a banker's bonus doesn't come out of the cleaner's wages. "No, it comes out of my accounts, essentially. Bonuses come out of all of our accounts, so I'm not having that either." And then he launches into a great, galloping political tirade against everything from the lobbying bill, fracking, the Chilcot inquiry – "We're still waiting for its report on the Iraq business and how the British public, never mind the House of Commons, were misled. Why's that taking so long?" – to NHS privatisation and Leveson.

"I think democratic accountability is almost non-existent, and the ordinary person now recognises just how non-existent it is. I think the average person is seriously worried about where it's all going. They don't believe what they're being told by the politicians, that the shoots are coming through and we might be over the worst. OK, so the deficit may be getting a bit smaller, maybe, but the debt isn't. We're all being hoodwinked by this lot, and the next lot, and the last lot. I don't see any of these things in isolation, I look at them as a whole spectrum of what's been going on over the last, I don't know, 25 years – probably longer, but that's long enough – and I'm saying to myself there has to be a democratic revolution."

He's sounding like a proper revolutionary. "Yes, I know," he agrees.

I try to steer him back to the issue of legal aid. The coalition may not have been very successful at reducing the deficit to date, but he must acknowledge that it has to be brought down? He is off again.

"Of course, we've all got to be careful, but actually how did this begin? It happened through the shadow economy back in the Labour government; they were allowing, effectively, the financial sector to get away with murder. You've got a shadow economy based on very thin ice, and then it crumbles at the expense of the people who haven't created it. It wasn't the school teacher, or the train driver, and it wasn't the legal aid lawyer – they didn't create this problem. The derivatives market, that's what it was all about. That's not me! I've got nothing to do with it.

"And we're having to pay for it. And when we say, excuse me, corporation tax, let's have a look at that, who are the people who are proud of avoiding paying their taxes? The cleaning lady pays her taxes, so instead of worrying about the prisoner in the example you gave, she should be worrying about why she's been paying tax when Starbucks, Google, you name it … I mean, this is immoral, I'm with Margaret Hodge. And excuse me, how about a cap on the bonuses? Oh, no, George Osborne, he's off to court. We're the only country in Europe who are challenging the common policy that if there's going to be a bonus, it should be no more than your last year's salary or whatever. Well, a lot of ordinary people do not get a bonus at Christmas, so why is there a bonus culture in which anybody expects a bonus? These are the people that got us into trouble in the first place, and Osborne's protecting bonuses for them! I don't think so, thank you."

Mansfield's critics are forever pointing out that he earns in the region of £300,000, and is therefore hardly qualified to talk about "the ordinary person", whose taxes fund his income. Whenever the charge was levelled at him in the past, he used to say he was all in favour of reforming barristers' pay – but when I bring this up he says he was calling for structural reforms, with a single funding stream for solicitors and barristers. "I am in favour of fusion of the professions, and it follows that once you've got fusion you can then redistribute how they're paid. But I think they have to be paid sufficient to do the job, with reasonable remuneration for the talent and expertise they have. That seems to me to be perfectly reasonable."

Instead, the coalition cuts have caused many lawyers to abandon legal aid work altogether. "In some situations lawyers have just disappeared from the scene. In other words, they've given up, they're not doing it. You will suffer if you get into a police station and need to find somebody who's of sufficient competence, who's still in the business, who'll come out in the middle of the night and see you. I know some solicitors are just saying, 'I'm not doing this.'"

Many junior barristers in London are now lucky, he says, if they make as much as a newly qualified teacher. "And in a number of cases, it's far less than that – and they've got to survive on this money. I'd like to think that MPs might consider whether they'd like to live on this." Alternatively, might MPs not point to Mansfield's own response to the cuts – the innovative new "virtual" chamber – as proof that it is in fact perfectly possible to provide a first-class, low-cost legal service?

"Right, but what they don't consider is the real decimation inside here," and he jabs at his heart, "for me to have to turn round and do this. This is me, at this age. It's not just about the sort of low-cost chambers. It's about having to think about a different way of working."

I could be wrong, but I suspect that if Mansfield were advising himself, he would strongly discourage offering this as any sort of legal argument against the cuts. The guileless abandon of his deep, personal outrage is immensely appealing, but also surprisingly clumsy, and for a moment I'm almost disappointed – until the very next second brings a reminder of why we need barristers like him.

I mention Trenton Oldfield, the Australian protester jailed for disrupting the Oxbridge boat race last year, who the Home Office is now trying to deport. There is a troubling parallel between the government's decision to classify Oldfield as an undesirable alien, just because he protested against elitism, and the Daily Mail's now-infamous notion that Ralph Miliband must have "hated Britain" because he expressed a similar critique. In a flash Mansfield has his notebook out. When is the tribunal date? What are the details?

By the following day he had found an immigration specialist in his chambers to take the case on, pro bono. The prospect of a legal system that will no longer accommodate more Mansfields suddenly looks very bleak.

Guardian