The entrance to Liberty House – an unassuming door tucked between a newsagent and a fried-chicken shop on a surprisingly un-Westminsterly market street in Westminster – doesn’t look like the way to freedom. Inside, in a corridor, there is a framed letter sent to the Guardian in 1934 by the founders of Liberty. Concerned by the rise of the far right and the animosity towards east European refugees, and particularly about the heavy-handed treatment by police (including undercover agent provocateurs) of a hunger march from the north, a bunch of like-minded libertarians started the National Council for Civil Liberties. The signatories include Clement Attlee, Vera Brittain, Edith Summerskill, EM Forster and HG Wells.
At the end of the corridor, another door opens into a bright modern office space with a quiet energy, full of files and people mostly in their twenties and thirties. It is hard to imagine from outside – a bit like Platform 9 ¾ from Harry Potter, as Shami Chakrabarti says. Chakrabarti – 45, former Home Office lawyer, “probably the most effective public affairs lobbyist of the past 20 years” (the Times), “undaunted freedom fighter” (the Observer), “the most dangerous woman in Britain” (the Sun), Question Time regular (“not for two years!” she claims), chancellor of every other university (only two, and one is coming to an end), collector of honorary doctorates (“plastic PHDs,” she calls them) – is of course the current boss.
Today’s world is different to the one of the letter writers in the corridor. Then there was no internet, CCTV, genetic profiling. Before the horrors of Hitler and Stalin were known, there was no Declaration of – or European Convention on – Human Rights, or UK Human Rights Act. But the purpose of the organisation – to protect and promote civil liberties and human rights – remains the same. As do the basic principles that underpin it: dignity, fairness and, most important of all, says Chakrabarti, equality.
She joined Liberty on 10 September 2001, and her work there has been defined by the events of the following day, especially since she took the helm in 2003. It has been an extraordinary period – “the best and worst, the challenge and the opportunity,” she says. “I do think to some extent people in recent years have become less complacent about rights and freedoms, a bit more aware, which is good. But at the same time that’s come at quite a price, the price of extraordinary rendition, blanket surveillance … Our challenge is to turn that awareness into something more acute, something that isn’t resigned.”
Chakrabarti has written a book, On Liberty, which chronicles her time in charge. It is a polemic, an attack on the kneejerk anti-terror legislation and those who introduced it – or attempted to: stop-and-search and ID cards, Belmarsh and Blunkett and Blair, 42-day detention, asbos and DNA databases. And a defence of the hard-won rights and liberties that have been, would have been or will be eroded.
It is utterly convincing and brilliantly argued, intellectually and morally. Read it if you agree, or if you’re broadly sympathetic but unsure of some of the arguments, or (she wishes) if you are a sceptic, motivated more by security than humanity and democracy, but you want to hear what the other side has to say. Don’t read it if you’re looking for lols, or a rollicking page-turner; it’s more lawyerly than writerly. Nor does it say much about Chakrabarti; her book may be very human but it’s not personal, and though I came away knowing exactly what she believes in, I didn’t feel I came away knowing her.
“It’s a book about human rights, and the personal stuff is the stuff that is relevant,” she says, fixing me with an intense stare. (Why is it, even when I’m asking the questions, that I feel as if it is me who is being cross-examined?) What personal stuff, though? There is a tiny bit about her parents. Surely they – and their Indian immigrant status – were key to shaping her and her ideas? “Of course. Look, we’re talking just after this momentous moment that could almost have gone one way or another in relation to the United Kingdom. It [the Scottish referndum] was a fantastic democratic exercise, with this massive turnout, that is obviously very heartening. But at the same time I must express relief that the United Kingdom is still together ... because regardless of all the problems we’ve had with race relations over the years in this country, I’d rather be a Chakrabarti in the UK than in France, Germany, Italy and possibly all over the white western European world.”
We talk about some of those race problems. She remembers being a small girl on the tube with her parents in the 70s when a group of football fans started singing racist chants at them. She doesn’t remember the attack by skinheads on Hampstead Heath (she was there in a pram), in which her father was seriously beaten up, resulting in a permanently bad back. She recalls feeling uncomfortable seeing union jacks in inappropriate places (on teapots and T-shirts, anywhere apart from up flagpoles really) until the Spice Girls made them OK again in the 90s.
Her father, a bookkeeper, was the argumentative one. Her mother, more reflective and thoughtful, never fulfilled her talents (singing and acting), or her university education. “A woman of few words, but I do remember her saying: ‘You can do anything you want to do,’” says her daughter. She died a few years ago, on the same day as Amy Winehouse – one chapter of Chakrabarti’s book is introduced by a Winehouse quote on how much she loves London. When Chakrabarti carried a corner of the Olympic flag into the stadium at the opening ceremony of London 2012, she wore her mother’s Indian pearls round her neck. Would she have been proud of her daughter? “I think so.”
Living in London bedsit land after their arrival in the late 50s and early 60s, her parents met and made friends with people from all over the world, which helped to shape Chakrabarti’s ideas of multiple identity and universal human rights. Sometimes she thinks of herself as a Londoner; at other times as an Asian or a woman, a lawyer or an activist. Identity is more complex than a tick in a box, she says. Rights shouldn’t be for just for your family, or people like you, “but also for the newly arrived refugee, or the person who for the moment is suspicious, or difficult, or an antisocial kid on a council estate ... It’s these worthy and unworthy categories of humanity, that’s the problem. And that’s why I say the most important human rights principle of all is equal treatment.”
There is another category to add to a parade of identities: mother. “For my son the Bean” is the dedication in the book. The Bean? “Because when he was newborn and I took him home and he was still in the foetal position [makes like a foetus, a bit beany], I thought he looked like a bean.”
She says that parenthood has actually made her care more about her work and what she believes in. “I want to be careful about this because I’m not trying to suggest in the slightest that you have to be a parent in order to care about human rights. But I do think that parenthood can be one of the things that makes you feel like you have a stake in the future. I think that, for me, I always cared about human rights in an abstract sense, and then when I had a child it was kind of abstract no more. And not just in terms of caring about freedom and autonomy but also caring about protection.”
It sounds odd, contrary almost, for an undaunted freedom fighter to talk in such a way about protection. She explains her position. “I’m not some sort of uber-libertarian person who doesn’t think we need a rule of law or that the vulnerable don’t need protecting. The beauty of human rights, as opposed to just uber-libertarianism, is that it’s a framework that balances respect and protection, and gives you a framework to help negotiate that territory. It doesn’t give you magic answers, it’s not a computer program, it’s more of a compass ... it helps you negotiate a balance.”
Kids get more than just a look-in, both in the book and our conversation. The antisocial council-estate ones – all children actually. They are another disenfranchised minority whose rights are as important as those of refugees and foreigners. Equality, equality, equality – it keeps on coming up. Chakrabarti speaks mostly like a lawyer – posh, assured, unhesitating, unambiguous, a little bit terrifying. But the odd “and I’m like, yeah, but ...” does creep in, refreshingly and reassuringly. Plus she looks about half her age and refers to herself as a perennial teenager because she’s always saying: “That’s not fair.” Never “I hate you”, though (I do try to make her, I promise). Her problem will be with a piece of legislation, not the person who introduced it – not Blunkett, not Blair or Brown or Cameron. In fact, even when she has had a right go at someone, she will give credit where it is due: to Blair for Northern Ireland, for example. Even the current lot, with whom she has plenty of beef (that they didn’t get rid of control orders but in effect just rebranded them; the justice and security bill; what they’ve done to legal aid), she is generous and fair and balanced enough to credit for same-sex marriage. “I don’t actually think I hate anyone,” she says, disappointingly. I’m not completely convinced.
Well, some people don’t seem to like her very much. I read her the introduction of a column by Rod Liddle. “There is something about Shami Chakrabarti ... that makes me squeal with irritation and start clawing at my throat whenever I hear her speak.”
“Well, I don’t think I’m the only woman he’s got a problem with,” she says, unfazed. “But look, there are bound to be some people who just vehemently disagree.”
Has she come to epitomise something that some people don’t like, and if so, what is it? “That might be true,” she says. “Small ‘l’ liberal values, for believing that human beings are all [there it is!] entitled to rights and freedoms regardless of race or other status. But some people may actually be sympathetic but just irritated by me, my syntax, that’s possible.”
She has heard about, but says she hasn’t seen, the Charlie Brooker black comedy Dead Set, in which a Big Brother-type reality-TV producer dismisses a contestant’s claim that his human rights are being abused by yelling “Fuck off Shami Chakrabarti” into the house PA system. “There’ve been others,” she says. “In that show Spooks, apparently it was an Asian woman who ran an organisation called The Libertarians – and she was very humourless, and she was always droning on in a sort of monotone about how the one-party state was coming.”
Is she humourless? “Well, I don’t think I can be the judge of that, others will have to do it … I don’t think I’m humourless but I wouldn’t, would I? Also, when you’re doing a 10-second soundbite for the news about kidnap and torture, there’s not a lot funnies in there. But it’s all right, people don’t have to like me, as long as I don’t become a bad advocate for the values or the issues. I’m not trying to be a pop star.”
One final question. Not a question, actually, but a task: an unannounced fridge inspection. In her book she talks about the culture shock of moving from the public sector to an NGO. One thing that struck her was that at the Home Office (the Dark Tower she calls it, sometimes Mordor), people had their own cartons of milk and wrote their names on them. But at Liberty it was communal – Liberty milk. It seems to have made quite an impression on her. I need to check the veracity of that. Not a big deal, you think? I disagree. If I find no Liberty milk, it will delegitimise the book, the argument, everything, like going into Iraq and finding no … you know.
And there it is: one carton of no-name, communal Liberty milk. “We’ve got better than that, mate,” says Chakrabarti, pulling out a jar. “We’ve got Liberty Marmite, too.” Love her or hate her (I’m so the former), she wins.
On Liberty by Shami Chakrabarti is published by Allen Lane, price £17.99. To order a copy for £13.99 including UK p&p, go to guardianbookshop.co.uk or call 0330 333 6846. To become a member of liberty, go to liberty-human-rights.org.uk/
