Holding the Line Against Tyranny and Anarchy (Constitution Committee Report)

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 9th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I have too little personal experience of Lord Mackay to be able to say anything substantial. But as a former church leader speaking to him as a wee free, we had animated and friendly conversation on more than one issue. At that level and in those terms, I add my own expression of admiration for, and enjoyment of the memory of, Lord Mackay.

I am a member of the Constitution Committee, the fourth to speak in this debate. We are restoring the focus. For a report of this kind to have generated a debate of this kind, with this divergence of views, is a tribute to the report. I thank all those who have spoken. I said in my membership of the committee that I am not from a political background; others around the table were. I am not from a legal background; others around the table were. So I must be vox populi—except that I had the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes of Cumnock, who never hesitates to be the vox populi himself. It has been, for me, a learning experience. The noble Baroness, Lady Laing, talked about being a member of a committee where she had as much to learn as to contribute, and I certainly feel that way myself. Indeed, I felt it was like a prolonged seminar. I remember signing up for a lengthy seminar series on 14th-century Icelandic literature in 1962. I felt then as I feel now: that the learning I acquired in the course of that has equipped me for life in all its shades and colours.

It has been a privilege to be part of the committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde. I thought seriously about adjectives for him: “genial” is one and “skilful” is another; the third, he will have to wait for when we cross in the corridors. The learning and experience around the table, the opportunity to have breakfast with the judges of the Supreme Court—things such as that have registered in my memory. They have made me, as an ordinary member of the public, far more aware of these luminaries who appear in the press, who have now become personalised by those simple events.

In contributing to this debate, I do not want to add to any of the substantive things that have been said about judges, for example. I want to fix my attention on solicitors. The Law Society sent us a briefing. It said that, in general, this is a pretty good report, but there was one point at which it raised a question that I will lay before Members now. We heard from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Neuberger, a moment ago about the extent to which we ought to listen to and interpret things that come out of Strasbourg. I am a member of the delegation that goes from this Parliament to Strasbourg, to the Council of Europe. Just over a year ago, it produced the Convention for the Protection of the Profession of Lawyer, or, in short, the Luxembourg convention. It was aware that across Europe—and we are not immune in this country—lawyers, solicitors, are on the front line facing people’s opinions, violence and abuse when things happen such as the 2024 riots in the north of England after the dreadful tragedy there.

Lawyers are reporting in greater and greater numbers that they are being subject to the same kind of popular, violent and abusive comments as judges. So we must think about them. I ask His Majesty’s Government and my noble friend the Minister, why, if we could sign the convention a year ago when it was produced in Strasbourg, we have not yet ratified it. Until we ratify it and take it into our own system, the solicitors it seeks to defend will not have the defences they are looking for in the protocol.

Finally, I turn to something rather more personal, and I make no apologies for it. It is a little story from my own life, but it is an elephant in the room that I feel I must bring into the debate. I mentioned it when we were with the judges, my friends—I consider them to be that—from the Supreme Court. I just love working in a cross-party group: it is marvellous, when we are so party-oriented, to have that opportunity, so I mentioned it there too.

My first memory of a court, unlike my noble friend Lord Stansgate, was not the Royal Courts of Justice; it was Llanelli Magistrates Court. It was way back in 1947, when I was five years of age. I was on one side of a big mahogany door—that is what registered in my memory—on the other side of which my parents were fighting out their marriage. A divorce ensued, and my mother brought us up—just the two boys—in one simple room for the rest of our life there. But I do not tell this story to invoke tears, pathos or anything like that. It is simply that, when my mother died—and I am going back home in a month to commemorate the 50th anniversary of her death—her estate amounted to one cardboard box of documents. One of those documents, which I had never seen before, was from my father’s solicitor. It indicated that, since his client had proved to the satisfaction of the court that my mother was the guilty party, he was writing to tell us that we—my mother and her two boys—must get out of the family home within a fortnight. That shaped and coloured the rest of my life.

I tell this tale for a simple reason. We heard about access to justice in the second speech; access to justice is one thing, but fairness for the people involved in that justice is another. Money enters into things at that stage. My father could afford a lawyer and my mother could not. She was the guilty party, and she was therefore obliged to raise two boys in abject penury during their formative years.

Let us look at these things in the round. Let us offer solicitors the protection they want, but never forget that glib phrases such as “access to justice” need to be quantified and measurable.