Stephen Pollard
She believes not only that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party must be protected from the accusation that it harbours anti-Semites but also that Phil Shiner must be protected from the idea that he is a nasty piece of work who deserves everything that has come to him.
This is the man, remember, whose grotesquely misnamed firm Public Interest Lawyers (PIL) trousered more than £4million of taxpayers’ money.
Utilising our credulous legal aid system and the unerring capacity of the establishment to do the work of its enemies, Mr Shiner constructed an entire legal eco-system of allegations and inquiries to reward his firm’s baseless accusations of war crimes.
He pretended to be a heroic human rights defender working to redress terrible wrongs done to Iraqi and Afghan civilians. In reality he was involved in using representatives in Baghdad and Basra to tout for clients who would be prepared to say they had been abused by British soldiers. But in December 2014 the judge-led inquiry into allegations that a group of Iraqi farmers had been murdered by British soldiers found that many of the so-called witnesses were lying.
The claims were “wholly without foundation and entirely the product of deliberate lies, reckless speculation and ingrained hostility”.
PIL pocketed £3million from the inquiry which cost taxpayers £31million. The entire edifice was built on lies.
Last week Sir Michael Fallon, the Defence Secretary, confirmed that the Iraq Historic Allegations Team (which has so far spent £60million investigating British troops) will be closed down. The vast majority of its cases were brought by Mr Shiner’s firm PIL.
Until the judge’s ruling in 2014, he was repeatedly lauded, not least by Baroness Chakrabarti in her former role at Liberty, where she made him their human rights lawyer of the year in 2004.
Liberty praised his “outstanding skill and tenacity in taking test cases to protect the rights of Iraqi civilians tortured and killed by British forces”.
In 2007 Rabinder Singh QC, who was PIL’s counsel in many of its Iraq cases, said: “Most of the time my honest view about lawyers is that we should be modest about what we contribute to justice but Phil Shiner is an exception to that rule.
“If there were no Phil Shiners in the country then the sort of legal issues arising out of the Iraq war I don’t think would have surfaced.”
SIR Rabinder Singh is now a high court judge. The Law Society itself honoured Mr Shiner in 2007 as their solicitor of the year. Indeed, even after the Iraq Inquiry collapsed, some on the Left simply refused to accept it. One Left-wing newspaper even claimed he had been the subject of a “vendetta” by the government and media.
The interlinked careers of Baroness Chakrabarti and Mr Shiner perfectly illustrate the wrong turn taken by Labour in recent years.
Most natural Labour supporters will be as outraged by Baroness Chakrabarti’s outlook and behaviour as they are by Phil Shiner’s.
And the irony of her leaping to the defence of a man who used human rights law to enable his wrongdoing will surely not be lost on anyone.
‘Troops hounded on the back of lies’