From a working-class background Vera Baird showed the fighting qualities needed to survive the male-dominated world of the bar. Today, as an MP, she is battling against the old-fashioned ways of the judiciary, reports Rachel Rothwell

‘There are people in the judiciary who should never have been appointed. In fact, some of them need to be compulsorily retired,’ says Vera Baird QC MP, as she sips a cappuccino in the Portcullis House cafeteria. The feisty barrister and Labour MP for Redcar is not known for mincing her words, and judges are frequently on the receiving end of her scorn – which could be one reason why she was not made QC until five years ago, despite being called to the bar in 1975.


Ms Baird was deputy head of the chambers of Michael Mansfield QC until she was elected MP for Redcar in 2001, following in the footsteps of the dauntingly popular Mo Mowlam, who held the gritty north-eastern constituency before her. She is now a member of Tooks Chambers in London, and still fits in a case or two during the summer recess, to make sure she is not ‘four years out of date’ when she speaks on criminal justice.


Many of her cases have involved defending women who have killed their violent partners – though as she points out, ‘I have also acted for gangsters and drug runners – I have defended a huge number of men’.


Ms Baird was chairwoman of the Fawcett Society before her election, an influential pressure group that campaigns on women’s issues. She is currently on the committee examining the forthcoming Equality Bill, and served on the standing committee for the Sexual Offences Bill, which attempted to address the shockingly low conviction rate for rape – currently just 5.6% of all reported rapes.


The incompetence of judges is one of the issues Ms Baird feels strongly about – and she has asked prickly parliamentary questions about what steps are being taken to discipline poor judges and introduce formal appraisals for the bench. But it is judicial attitudes in rape trials that have her really straining at the leash.


The Sexual Offences Act 2003 put the onus on men to show that consent was not refused, and made it clear that a woman must have the ‘freedom and capacity’ to make a choice. But last November, a High Court judge in Swansea directed an acquittal after the prosecution abandoned a rape case. The prosecution told the jury that ‘drunken consent is still consent’ – and the judge agreed, telling the jury to return a verdict of not guilty. The case has been dubbed a ‘green light’ for rapists. Ms Baird was one of the judge’s most damning detractors in the press, claiming that he was ‘utterly and totally wrong’ in the light of the new legislation. She is still fuming. ‘It is hard to overestimate the scale of damage of that decision. It sends a message that if you are raped, you get no justice,’ she rails.


‘I am appalled by the lack of accountability of the judiciary. I understand 100% the need for judicial independence from government. As parliamentarians, we would not tolerate government interference – not Labour MPs, nor the Tories. But independence does not mean the right to have a cavalier attitude. Before 2002, judges rejected any training on sexual offences. Specific training was introduced in 2002 as a result of parliamentary questions I had asked. And some of the judges who have been on these courses have displayed wholly unacceptable attitudes.


‘One of them, in the middle of a lecture, said the reason why so few men are convicted of rape is that most of these women have consented, and lie about it afterwards. That is horrifying, but what is even more horrifying is that he was not greeted by condemnation by the other judges. And they resent having to do the training at all. We have a major problem with an old-fashioned judiciary.’


As you would expect, Ms Baird heartily backs the government’s drive to get more women on the bench, and also thinks the new Judicial Appointments Commission (JAC), which will bring more transparency to the process, will make a difference. But she warns: ‘All that can only work up to a point. We need to get more solicitors, which is imperative, and more academics, and promote people from the stipendiary magistracy. That will bring on a lot more people, but that is going round the bar, and we have got to actually change the bar. More women are joining the bar, but they do not last long. It needs to be run in a way that is compatible with the lives that women live.’


In fact, Ms Baird thinks the forthcoming Equality Bill could finally provide the push that barristers need. That is because members of chambers who do not promote and retain women could find themselves missing out on QC status and judicial appointments. She says: ‘The Equality Bill means that public authorities, and private deliverers of public functions, will have a duty to promote gender equality. That means the JAC may have to say to chambers [ and law firms] which have not got diversity policies in place, and do not have a good record on equality, that they will appoint no one from those chambers, either male or female, until they put those policies in place. Part of the JAC’s duties will be to promote from chambers with [such] policies.


‘That will shock, but shocking is not a problem. The men have nothing to lose by being made to bring women and ethnic minorities on. The bar is difficult, because people are self-employed, but it is up to chambers to work out how to do it. My experience at the bar has been that male barristers do have very sexist views.’


Ms Baird comes from what she describes as a ‘working class background’ in Oldham, Lancashire. Her father died of pneumonia when she was ten, due to paint on the lungs caused by a lifelong career painting machinery in cotton mills. ‘They didn’t give them masks in those days,’ she says. ‘We were poor before, and after he died we were really poor. There were barriers, but I was oblivious to them. I got my fun out of doing schoolwork.’ Ms Baird went on to a grammar school, where she lost most of her accent, and from there studied law at what was then Newcastle Polytechnic.


Entering the world of the bar was something of a shock, she remembers. ‘It was pretty ghastly, coming from that background and joining the bar. It was at the inns dinners that I was exposed on a most wholesale basis to seriously posh people. Although I had a secure family background, it is hard to have that social confidence, and of course they were all very confident. Social confidence can be a real problem for working-class people.


‘I remember there was this silly system of “charging” people with offences, and if you lost the debate you were fined a bottle of port. One time, some man with whom I happened to be sharing a table, got up – because I was going to a 21st birthday party later and was wearing evening clothes with a slightly low-cut top – and charged me with “incitement to rape”.


‘I was 23, in a room mostly full of men –and barristers of course, who should have known better – and they were all saying to me, “get up on the table so we can have a look at you”. I was thinking, all I want is to be a barrister, why am I expected to put up with all this humiliation? Anyway, I said something like, “what we have here might be a sexual predator. Or is he just a very immature preppy?”’ She escaped the fine.


Ms Baird was widowed in 1979 when she lost her second husband Brian following heart surgery. ‘He was the love of my life’, she says frankly, and she still wears her wedding ring. She is instantly likeable and down to earth – as the photographer arrives she frets that ‘I haven’t brushed my hair for two weeks’. She bounds along with giant, almost ungainly strides, leaving the impression that nothing much gets in her way.


This seems to be the case. Last November, Ms Baird became parliamentary private secretary (PPS) to Home Secretary Charles Clarke, a role which is traditionally seen as the first rung towards becoming a minister. PPSs act as a minister’s eyes and ears to keep them informed of backbench opinion.


‘Sometimes it feels a bit like being in school,’ she says of her life at Westminster. ‘I can be in a meeting about the Equality Bill, and then it is like a bell goes, and I go to a meeting on regeneration, or steel, or petrochemicals, or shipbuilding, or housing market renewal.’


She says she has grown to love campaigning, because she has had to. ‘I have quite an outgoing personality, but as an MP you have to be even more’ – she gestures theatrically – ‘outgoing. You walk into a room full of people, and you can’t just talk to a few of them. You have to talk to everyone, or they will see it as a snub.’


Would she ever consider a full-time return to the bar? ‘We get a long summer break, and when most people are on holiday, I do a case, and I have done a few appeals to the Court of Appeal recently. I do it to keep me fresh and up to date, and to re-engage with friends at the bar.’


‘But I have made the move into politics now,’ she says firmly, ‘and that is where I intend to stay.’