The government has set the rightwing press on me because I have represented someone being deported to Rwanda – but I know people can see through their deception
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.
Jacqueline McKenzie is a partner and head of immigration and asylum law at Leigh Day
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