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I appreciate that this is a sensitive topic and that everyone has a view one way or another. However, as a white person who was neither rich nor well-connected, was I a victim too in terms of being shunned by the top end of the legal profession?

Recall a certain Jeremy Marks' very interesting article in The Times 20 years ago about the endless difficulties faced by intelligent, hardworking and conscientious young law graduates (male and female) who had probably sacrificed their social lives and their savings too, in order to try and become Barristers, only to be rejected by the Bar in favour of Oxbridge graduates 90% or more of the time.

Of course, most of us (hopefully) would like to see an ideal society without any discrimination mostly in the form of racism and sexism. However, some of my own experiences have shown some things in a different light. For example, I went to a substandard comprehensive school near London many years ago where I was bullied and assaulted on a few occasions by pupils from ethnic backgrounds, both male and female. I wasn’t the only one that this happened to but there was no question at that time of any sort of punishment for the perpetrators. I then went to a better school where there were only a handful of pupils from ethnic minority backgrounds. They were much better behaved even though they weren’t very well treated. Fortunately, I was able to make some good friends from ethnic minority backgrounds at university and in the workplace and I accepted that what had happened at that first school was partly due to a bad environments and bad individuals. Remember also Diane Abbott’s interesting comments a few years ago about how white teachers in inner London schools were still afraid to tackle unruly black pupils. That is very concerning because as well as those teachers having to fear for their own safety, the pupils concerned and others are presumably being prevented from getting an education which is in no one’s interests.

Further, a few years ago, I was in a department store and I accidentally stopped in the wrong spot. A perfectly respectable-looking lady immediately gave me a look of diabolical hatred and pointed me to the back of the queue. I did not say anything and moved to the back of the queue. On another occasion in a sports shop, there were several queues and a person from an ethnic minority background pushed through one of the queues to be served. In the 5 minutes or so, nobody once challenged that person or even commented about how rude they were. Minor incidents maybe but they reminded me that people from ethnic minorities could sometimes be the bullies and that white people could sometimes be the victims.

In relation to the legal profession itself, we should all want to see more lawyers from ethnic backgrounds being much better represented. Presumably, those people too want to achieve due to merit and not solely due to positive discrimination or because of a few of them coming from wealthy backgrounds. Whether a project such as this is the right way forward remains to be seen.

Finally, for people who continue to look down at ethnic minorities, they should remember that the greatest person of the 20th century was Gandhi and that the greatest unsung hero was Malcolm X.