To the Bar the long, hard way

As a QC and the chairman for the Society of Labour Lawyers, Vera Baird has made history more than once. But it hasn't been easy for a woman with working-class roots, as Robert Verkaik discovers

Vera Baird is a rare phenomenon in the law – a woman from a working-class background who has made it to the rank of QC. In April, she also made Labour Party history by becoming the first female chairman of the Society of Labour Lawyers, succeeding the human-rights solicitor Geoffrey Bindman. But it was her election to the House of Commons last year that constituted the achievement of her greatest dream, and at the same time gave the legal profession a truly independent voice in the Palace of Westminster.

In the past 12 months, the barrister MP for Redcar has campaigned on a range of issues, including a change in the rape laws, the abolition of the death penalty in America and more frequent prosecution of domestic-violence offences – as well as championing many pressing constituency matters. Such a convincing start to a political career has meant that her name has been linked with jobs in government. But Baird's career path is a lesson to all those who think that it is no longer possible to come up the hard way.

In Oldham, where Baird began her life, her father found occasional work painting machinery in the local cotton mills. "My parents were poor, and my father was frequently out of work, through no fault of his own," she recalls. These experiences have never left her, and she is happy to remind people that, despite her success as a barrister and now a politician, "I understand how life is for inner-urban poor people."

After leaving Chadderton Grammar School, in Oldham, she won a place at Newcastle University, where she studied law with the ambition of becoming a barrister. "I did not have any money, and you had to pay to get a pupillage in those days. I always wanted to be a barrister but felt I had to train to be a solicitor, where I at least got paid £15 a week. But the work I really wanted to do was taken away from me and sent to barristers."

A year later, after marrying a teacher from Newcastle, she decided to make a last-ditch attempt for the Bar. She won a pupillage but found that no one was prepared to take her on as a tenant in chambers.

Instead, Baird decided to set up her own chambers, a radical step in those days, which she ran as a co-operative. By 1986, the chambers had grown to 15 tenants. But Baird had outgrown Newcastle; she was now being recognised by the bigger radical chambers in London.

"I was deeply involved in defending miners in Northumberland and Durham during the miners' strike. In the Orgreave trials, where 90 men were charged with riot, I met other lawyers who shared my beliefs, such as Michael Mansfield QC, Tony Gifford, and Gareth Pierce." Shortly afterward, she joined Tony Gifford's chambers and then Michael Mansfield's Tooks Court.

For the past 15 years, she has been involved in most of the leading industrial-dispute cases, as well as defending those charged in the Strangeways Prison disturbances and the poll-tax riots. Recently, she acted for Jane Andrews, a former assistant to the Duchess of York, when she appealed against her conviction for the murder of her boyfriend, Tommy Cressman.

Baird's political career began at university, when she was elected vice-president of her student union at the same time as Jack Straw was president of the National Union of Students. Not long afterward, she joined the Labour Party. Since then, she has served her time by contesting and losing a number of seats where she has agreed to fly the Labour Party flag with no expectation of winning.

Then, two years ago, Mo Mowlam made it clear that she was standing down from Parliament, and Baird found herself in pole position to succeed her. The only words of advice Mowlam offered her constituency party were that her successor should be a woman. The veteran politician and darling of the Labour Party must be gratified in the knowledge that Vera Baird QC has easily surpassed that minimum requirement.

In the short time since her election, Baird has shown that she is capable of being just as brave and outspoken a politician as Mowlam. This year, she flew out to America, with the blessing of the Prime Minister, to try to persuade the Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole to spare the life of Tracy Housel, a British death-row prisoner who had suffered brain damage. "It was intended to be another blow against the death sentence in the US," she explains. "We could show the state parole board the strength of British feeling."

Although the 11th-hour mercy mission ultimately ended in failure, and Housel was executed, a US federal court has since ruled that passing a death sentence on a defendant with brain damage is a breach of his human rights. That ruling would, on the face of it, have saved Tracy Housel.

Baird has also been in the vanguard of the campaign to toughen the law against rape – especially in drug-rape cases, where defendants have, previously, escaped conviction by arguing that they believed the victim had consented. "We hope the Government will support us in this, and I'm surprised at the strength of response from ministers," says Baird.

But the Redcar MP will curry less favour with the Government if she opposes its flagship criminal-justice legislation, which is expected to be unveiled later this month. The signals from Whitehall suggest that ministers have watered down the plan to curb the right to jury trial for thousands of defendants, but the White Paper is still expected to contain enough illiberal measures to provoke opposition from the back benches.

"When ministers talk about criminal-justice reform, they tend to say things have gone too far in the direction of the defendant," she says. "They blame either delays or unsatisfactory outcomes in the court. But you ask the chairman of the Criminal Bar Association, which is not dominated by defence barristers, and the Law Society, and they will say most delays are caused by the grossly underfunded Crown Prosecution Service and the police."

She adds: "We ought to shake off attachment to the defence or attachment to the victim and look at the criminal-justice system – and how it works – more objectively, without benefiting one side or the other."

But Baird, who has agreed to head up an independent commission investigating how women are being failed by the criminal-justice system, reserves her sternest criticism for the judiciary. She describes the UK's body of judges as a "powerful pressure group, which is operating for its own purpose and not serving the community and refusing to get involved in the community."

She says: "The judiciary has got to be changed radically; understand that they are public servants and they should be appointed and trained to do their job in an answerable way. It's nothing to do with having independent judges; they can still be paid and trained to do their job in a modern way, but they have to be brought into a modern society. I hope this government will tackle this job, but I don't think it will."

Vera Baird has shown she is unafraid to speak her mind when she has strong views. And even innocent questions about her age draw her into a polemical discussion. "Look, I'm not going to answer that question – I never do. The age thing is always about women – it's never about men."