Lammy’s Lament — a Case of Misplaced Dissatisfaction

Civitas, 25 November 2004

According to reports in yesterday’s newspapers, David Lammy is not a happy bunny. In that respect, he is probably no different from the vast majority of his compatriots who daily make their way wearily to and from work, doubtless concerned about where to find the readies this year to cover the costs of celebrating Christmas.
Why should Mr Lammy’s unhappiness be deemed more worthy an item of news than theirs?

Mr Lammy differs from the vast majority of his compatriots in at least two respects that make his unhappiness more newsworthy, at least in the eyes of newspaper editors.
First, as well as being a Labour MP for the London constituency of Tottenham, Mr Lammy is currently junior minister at the Department for Constitutional Affairs. Moreover, Mr Lammy is not just any old MP or even junior minister. At 32 years of age, Mr Lammy remains one of the youngest MPs, not to mention Government ministers. Moreover, when elected in 2000 at the age of 28, he was the youngest person to be elected to Westminster for decades, if not centuries.
It is, however, not just his relative youth in relation to the level of seniority of the position he holds in public life that makes the state of Mr Lammy’s mental well-being such a matter of public interest.
Mr Lammy stands out from the vast majority of his fellow ministers and MPs, not to mention the vast majority of his compatriots, by virtue of being black. Moreover, he achieved his prominence in public life against all the seeming odds, for he achieved his swift advancement from the most seemingly unpromising of circumstances. Born and raised in Tottenham to a black single mother as one of five children, Mr Lammy managed to escape his relatively disadvantaged background through educational scholarships that led him to gain law degrees from London and Harvard and thereby pursue a successful career at the bar before taking up his present career in politics.
With all this going for him, one wonders what Mr Lammy could possibly find wrong with the world to make him unhappy. Precisely what has turns out to be a second way in which his unhappiness differs from that of his everyday un-newsworthy compatriots.
Most normal everyday unhappiness springs from people considering themselves to have not enough money or from being jilted. Mr Lammy’s state of unhappiness springs from less mundane concerns than these. It springs from what he considers is the insufficient diversity within the legal profession through whose ranks he has made such swift and notable progress.
Mr Lammy made known his dissatisfaction with the lack of diversity in the legal profession in a speech he delivered in London on Tuesday of this week to a meeting of the Standing Conference on Legal Education. There he drew attention to the need for greater diversity in the legal profession by making the following remark: ‘Whilst the values of diversity are widely accepted – in reality, diversity is permeating the dense structures of our legal profession only very slowly. We need to speed up the process’.
Although, in is speech, Mr Lammy recognised and welcomed the fact that ‘there are more black or minority ethnic solicitors than ever’, it would seem there are still not enough of them to satisfy him. He complained that, in 2003, only just under 8% of solicitors with practising certificates came from an ethnic minority background, as did only 10% of self-employed barristers, and 14 % of employed barristers.
Mr Lammy reveals how much ethnic minority participation in the legal profession would be needed to satisfy him when he described as good news that over 25% of current law students are black or from an ethnic minority.
What saddens Mr Lammy most is not so much the sheer lack of ethnic minority lawyers. It is their lack of relative progress and success within their profession. ‘We should not be content with black and ethnic minority lawyers finding only that they are doing asylum and immigration work’, he states.
Who or what, in Mr Lammy’s view, is to blame for their relative lack of achievement and success? In his eyes, the fault lies with the top legal firms and chambers who, in his view, are not doing enough to sponsor and recruit law students who attend new universities in comparison with those they sponsor and recruit who study at Oxbridge. What these firms must do, according to Mr Lammy, to remedy their fault is engage in more aggressive outreach and affirmative action so they recruit more ethnic minority lawyers and to positions in which they will eventually enjoy the greatest income and prestige within their profession.
How deserving of sympathy is Mr Lammy for what ails him? Not a lot, it must be said.
First of all, according to the Office for National Statistics, ethnic minorities currently make up only 7.9% of the overall population. This is exactly the same proportion as that in which they are currently present in the legal profession. Why should diversity require they be represented in greater numbers?
Second, were ethnic minorities to be represented in the legal profession in the greater numbers for which Mr Lammy calls, this could only have come about were they selected on grounds other than merit or ability, unless they were demonstrably more able or more ambitious than their white counterparts. Mr Lammy produces no evidence they are. Since, without evidence of their being so, it would come dangerously close to chauvinism or worse for him to claim they were, it can only be inferred that Mr Lammy is requesting law firms to recruit and sponsor law students on grounds other than merit. This need not necessarily be in their best interest, as a recent study has shown.
A recently published study of the effects of affirmative action on behalf of black law students, conducted by Richard Sander, a law professor at UCLA, found that, on the whole, they were harmed not helped by it. Professor Sander wrote that most of the black law students whom affirmative action had helped gain places at top law schools “end up at schools where they will struggle academically and fail at higher rates than they would in the absence of preferences.” Professor Sander concludes, “A strong case can be made that in the legal education system as a whole, racial preferences end up producing fewer black lawyers each year than would be produced by a race-blind system.’
As for Mr Lammy’s concern that the top and most lucrative law firms are not doing enough to sponsor and recruit ethnic minority law students, Mr Lammy has produced zero evidence the firms in question do not recruit and sponsor solely on grounds of ability not colour, as his own remarkable progress within the legal profession testifies.
It is hardly surprising top law firms recruit students from Oxbridge, and, we might add, from Harvard, given this is where they have sponsored them to study. Nor is it surprising that it is these universities the top firms sponsor students to attend. It may not have escaped Mr Lammy’s attention that Oxbridge and Ivy League Universities are almost universally thought to offer the best higher education which is precisely why his Government is at such pains to increase the rate of minority participation at them.
In conclusion, it would seem there are better things for Mr Lammy to worry about appertaining to the law and diversity than his concerns about what turn out to be a wholly illusory lack of diversity in his former profession. One such is the over-representation of ethnic minorities among victims of mugging and violent crime. Another is the apparent over-representation of some ethnic minorities among the perpetrators of them. Happy Xmas, Mr Lammy!