Solicitors seek fringe benefits

The general election is being fought on two levels.

While the big guns exchange fire, lawyers are also active on behalf of the minor parties, reports stephen ward

Not all solicitors who go into politics do it for the chance of having a hand on the tiller of the ship of state.

Others embark on much smaller vessels, often ones which have little or no prospect of making it into the water.

Outside the big three in England and Wales, the party facing this election with the greatest hopes of advancement happens to be led by lawyers.

Plaid Cymru's leader in the Commons, with four MPs in the last Parliament and good reason to expect more come 7 June, is solicitor Elfyn Llwyd, MP for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy.He says his party will give disillusioned Labour voters in Wales an alternative they lack in England.

Legal issues have helped fuel that disillusion, he adds.

'When I first came to this constituency to practise as a lawyer, there were seven magistrates' courts.

Now there is one.

Local justice is a concept which has apparently been discarded.' Mr Llwyd is unhappy about the erosion of the role of lay magistrates.

And legal aid reforms have similarly weakened access to justice.

'We're losing the services of very good civil and criminal lawyers in my constituency.

They are not applying for franchises because they simply don't have the manpower to go through the paperwork.'He took over as Commons leader during the last Parliament from another solicitor, Ieuan Wyn Jones, who is now the party's president and who won one of the first seats in the devolved Welsh assembly.

Mr Jones is not contesting his Westminster seat this time round.The new candidate for Mr Jones' Ynys Mn constituency is also a solicitor, Eilian Stuart Williams, who practises in Holyhead.Mr Llwyd, who stopped practising as a solicitor in 1997, specialised in criminal and civil litigation.

He was articled to David Lloyd George's old firm - William George & Son in Porthmadog - then on qualification joined Guthrie Jones & Jones in Bala and Dolgellau, where he became a partner in 1978.

Having requalified, he now practises as a barrister on the Chester circuit 'when time permits, mostly during the recess'.Mr Llwyd says the number of lawyers is purely a coincidence.

'But being from a legal background does help you to understand the procedures of Parliament, and the way this place ticks, probably better than most other professions.

You get used to the conventions, the niceties, and all the semi-court approach in some committees and so forth.' However, the advocacy skills have been less useful, he maintains.

'You are taught as a lawyer to play down emotion.

If you do that in Parliament people will think you are the dullest man alive.

It's more theatrical.' Paul Ward, a member of the Green Party for 15 years and an assistant solicitor with London firm McMillen Hamilton McCarthy, is spokesman for the party on asylum and immigration.

The Greens have candidates contesting half the seats in England, but he is not one of them, because he is too busy with his day job to stand as a candidate.

He will not be able to take leave for the campaign.

In any case, with the current pressure on asylum seekers, and the shortage of specialist solicitors to advise them, he maintains that he can do more good with direct action as a solicitor than as an MP.

Immigration is a green issue, Mr Ward says, to the extent that one of the party's policies is to extend the right to asylum from political to ecological migrants.

'Water shortages are driving people out of large areas of Africa.

The sea level is rising, so that several Pacific islands are already flooding, and most of Bangladesh will be under water in 20 years' time, according to the scientists,' he says.The Greens differentiate themselves from the main parties by advocating a more liberal policy on asylum.

'We are getting a lot of interest from local papers, willing at least to put an alternative view alongside the other side's claims of floods of bogus applicants, and so on,' he says.The party further suggests the volume of asylum seekers in Britain could be reduced not by tougher physical restrictions at the ports, and harsher interpretation of the rules, but by removing the causes.

By introducing, for example, greater arms control - thus reducing wars and the number of people at risk and homeless.

Barbara Roche, the Home Office minister who spent much of the past four years defending the government's record on asylum seekers, is opposed in her north London constituency of Hornsey and Wood Green by the human rights solicitor Louise Christian.

And Home Secretary Jack Straw is challenged by civil liberties specialist Jim Nichol of London firm Taylor Nichol.Though Ms Christian is not taking a block of leave for the duration of the campaign, she says she is 'devoting a lot of time to the election' and reels off a long list of meetings, hustings and debates already in her diary.

Like Mr Nichol, Ms Christian, a partner at London firm Christian Fisher, and a former Labour candidate, is representing the Socialist Alliance, and says: 'The main motivation for standing against Barbara Roche is my disgust at the treatment of asylum seekers by the government.

My firm represents a lot of asylum seekers.'Also, I am appalled by the attacks on civil liberties, attacks on trial by jury, the proposal to increase the prison population, and the variety of proposals to extend the criminal law into areas it hasn't been in previously.

Anybody concerned about civil liberties will have a lot of problems supporting this government.'As a solicitor for families of the victims of the Paddington and Southall train crashes, she also intends to highlight her fears about the proposed privatisation of London Underground.

'The basic problem is the same as with the railways,' she says.'There isn't a centralised management of safety.

It's broken up among private companies.'Tony Bennett, one of 400-plus UK Independence Party candidates, is a former solicitor who now spends half his time advising at tribunals, and the other half advising the party on its anti-metrication campaign.He was campaign co-ordinator in the Euro elections in 1999, in which the party gained its first three seats, and prompted him to stop practising and start working full-time as political adviser to the new MEP Jeffrey Titford.

His task this election is to chip away at the 25,000 votes won in Harlow, Essex, by Labour MP and Euro-enthusiast Bill Rammell.As a former lawyer, he says he is concerned about the loss of legal sovereignty to the European Court of Justice on the one hand, and to the European Court of Human Rights on the other.He was a member of the Labour Party for 12 years from 1985, and thought Europe was not terribly important, until he 'came to see there was a deliberate plot to dismantle the United Kingdom'.

The case of the Blackburn market trader prosecuted for selling fruit in pounds confirmed his fears.Peter Miller, a commercial property solicitor, has been spared making the decision whether to try to improve on the 70 votes he gained last time round fighting Tooting in south London for the Natural Law Party, - 27,446 votes adrift of the winner, and 13 behind the Rainbow Dream Ticket Alliance.The party, which was set up in 1992 has decided not to contest this election, saying the system is stacked against new parties.

Mr Miller, a sole practitioner and also a consultant with London firm Davis & Co, explains how he came to be a candidate last time: 'I learned Transcendental Meditation and I became a teacher of TM many years ago.' Standing for election took a lot of time, he recalls.

'I had to make sure the local press got the press releases, and to arrange for the distribution of my own leaflets.' He explains that his time was his own because of his self-employed status.

'I didn't have a boss I had to ask if I could have time off.

I can work in the early hours of the morning, and play during the day if I want to.'Mr Miller's association with the Natural Law Party has not been totally fruitless.

The party has been his one-time client as well as his party - he helped it re-draft its constitution.His legal expertise has also been tapped by the Maharishi Foundation, the registered charity which teaches Transcendental Meditation, and has used him for its commercial property work, including the sale of its headquarters.

'That was a perk, which came from being a solicitor, I suppose,' he says.Of all the smaller parties, it seems that, for solicitors at least, being a member of Natural Law can really pay off both spiritually and financially.Stephen Ward is a freelance journalist