The solicitor on voting laws, how legal aid cuts have priced out the ‘squeezed middle’ and his fears for high-street firms

Gerald Shamash has already saved Jeremy Corbyn from electoral defeat. The solicitor’s late-night dash to the Royal Mail sorting office, armed with a judge’s order, prevented delivery of politically damaging – and inaccurate – leaflets. That was 1983, the year the Labour leader was first elected to parliament for Islington North, beating off a challenge by the SDP.

More than 35 years later, Shamash is still advising the Labour party on electoral and legal issues, but in June, he merged his firm, Steel and Shamash, with Edwards Duthie, as cuts to legal aid threaten the commercial existence of many high-street lawyers.

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Edwards Duthie Shamash will have 18 partners and a 140-strong workforce in London, a consolidation aimed at achieving economies of scale, covering most aspects of civil and criminal law. The move coincides with the 70th anniversary of a diminished legal aid system. Since 2012 cuts have reduced the budget by about £950m a year in real terms, depriving hundreds of thousands of claimants of the right to legal representation and undermining the profitability of traditional, smaller law firms. Figures out this week show that half of all law centres and not-for-profit legal advice services in England and Wales have closed over the past six years.

Shamash himself was an unsuccessful Labour parliamentary candidate in 1979, but served as a councillor in Barnet, north London, for eight years. Not initially an expert on the law governing voting, he accumulated knowledge as the party handed him more and more election cases. One of his first came in 1983. The Islington North Labour MP, Michael O’Halloran, had defected to the newly formed SDP then switched to “Independent Labour”. Shamash learned he was about to send out an election leaflet containing false statements about Corbyn, which potentially breached electoral law.

Late in the evening, Shamash applied for emergency legal intervention. “We trekked off to see Mr Justice Sheldon in his private rooms in Chelsea,” Shamash recalls.“I obtained a hand-written order from the judge stopping delivery of the leaflets. “I took off for St Martin’s Lane post office in central London and found the duty night manager.” At first the official did not believe he could be told to prevent the vans going out. “He went away to phone the justice’s clerk to confirm it was true.

“Eventually we stopped delivery of 60,000 leaflets. They took all the mailbags away and removed all the material.” In the end, Corbyn won Islington North by a majority of around 5,000 – setting him on the parliamentary road to party leadership.

Since then, Shamash has covered numerous electoral disputes, constituency boundary inquiries, and advised on party finances as well as the parliamentary expenses scandal. This month he took delivery of his latest challenge – an election petition by the Brexit party, alleging malpractice in postal voting during the recent Peterborough byelection that Labour narrowly won.

Shamash worries about the future for legal aid firms. Labour has pledged to restore the right to early legal advice for housing, benefits and other areas removed by the 2012 Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act. The Labour Campaign for Legal Rights has called on the party to commit to the more generous recommendations of the Bach report that would deliver a legally enforceable right to justice and cost an estimated £400m.

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But it is the “squeezed middle”, he explains, who can no longer afford lawyers, partially because the financial thresholds for eligibility have not been uprated for years. “If people have an income and a reasonable job, then representing them is difficult,” he says. “They are not eligible for legal aid.”

Shamash’s new business partner, Shaun Murphy,who also sits as a crown court recorder – a junior part-time judge, says the cuts mean legal aid work attracts only those really committed to the work these days. Graduates join the firm often with up to £50,000 of debt accumulated from university and course fees. “Our private cases tend to subsidise the legal aid side of the work,” says Murphy. “We are paid a fixed fee by the Legal Aid agency, not what the case is actually worth. The age profile of legal aid lawyers is changing; we are all getting older.

“The two sides of our firm complement each other and extend our areas of expertise and we benefit from economies of scale. But there’s also a downside. “If firms have to become bigger it will lead to the demise of the traditional, high-street law firm. Solicitors with knowledge of local communities will disappear.

“It’s more acute [outside London] where are already ‘advice deserts’” – areas where there no local expertise in certain legal specialisms. You used to be able to walk to the high street and see someone who would understand your problems. That’s not always going to be available now.”Shamash agrees. “I hope high-street solicitors don’t disappear,” he says. “What would happen if they went from somewhere like Stockport; everyone would have to travel to Manchester. That can’t be right.”

Curriculum vitae

Age: 72.

Lives: London.

Family: Married with three children.

Education: North Cestrian Gammar School and Burnage Grammar School, Manchester. Studied science at University of Surrey before qualifying as a solicitor.

Career: 2019: partner in Edwards Duthie Shamash; 1981-2019: founder and partner, Steel & Shamash; 1986-94: councillor, Barnet council; 1976-81: solicitor, PR Kimber Solicitors.

Public life: magistrate (since 1985); trustee of Hansard Society; chair of Manchester United Supporters Trust; vice-chair of Society of Labour Lawyers.

Interests: Playing tennis, watching Manchester United.