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Music PR who calmed
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Judy Totton
Page 62On January 6, 1978, Judge Neil McKin-
non presided over the trial of John
Kingsley Read, the former chairman of
the National Front and the founder of a
new far-right organisation, the
National Party. Read stood accused of
inciting racial hatred for a speech in
which he used several unambiguously
racist terms, including the n-word, and
said of the recent murder of an Asian
man, Gurdip Singh Chaggar, “one
down, a million to go”.
McKinnon advised the jury to acquit
Read, saying that the racial slurs were
not in themselves unlawful. He argued
that their impact depended on their
“circumstances and their intent”, ad-
ducing their use in nursery rhymes as
evidence that they were not necessarily
malicious.
He described Read as “obviously a
man who has had the guts to come for-
ward in the past and stand up in public
for the things that he believes in”. After
the jury had acquitted Read, McKinnon
told him, “I wish you well.”
The judge’s words provoked national
fury. More than 100 MPs called for his
resignation. To Sibghatullah Kadri, the
founder of Britain’s first multiracial
chambers at 11 King’s Bench Walk, in
central London, McKinnon’s well-
wishing of Read was an outrage but not
a surprise.
Kadri had founded his chambers in
1973 after years of unsuccessful struggle
to attain tenancy elsewhere. At the time
there were, by his count, no more than
ten ethnic-minority barristers practis-
ing in Britain, and no Queen’s Counsels.
Many solicitors refused to brief ethnic-
minority barristers, on the basis that
clients, judges and juries preferred
white British ones. So to Kadri, McKin-
non’s words merely added to the super-
fluity of evidence that the legal system
was institutionally racist.
Though racism in his profession
seemed pervasive, that did not sap his
energy to fight it. Kadri was well known
to the Bar as a troublemaker, having or-
ganised, while a student, the first sit-in
at the Inns of Court School of Law.
The sit-in, which was part of a cam-
paign for students to be allowed to un-
ionise, as well as to highlight that Brit-
ish students received more tuition than
Commonwealth ones, made the front
page of The Times. Kadri was also the
co-founder of the Society of Afro-Asian
and Caribbean Lawyers, renamed in
1981 the Society of Black Lawyers.
In response to McKinnon’s com-
ments, Kadri told journalists that he
and 20 other barristers from an ethnic
minority would boycott his courtroom.
The Bar Council then invited him in for
a discussion. “But it turned out that it
wasn’t actually concerned with McKin-
non’s behaviour,” he recalled. “It was
our behaviour that was unacceptable.
We refused to back down, and though
there was no formal censure of the
judge at all, the lord chancellor event-
ually let it be known that McKinnon
would ‘prefer’ not to hear ‘comparable’
cases again.”
In the early 1980s, Kadri defended
people accused of taking part in the
Bristol and Brixton riots, as well as
the Bradford Twelve, a group of anti-
fascists charged with manufacturing
explosives for what they claimed was
“defensive use”.
The demand was met. The book was
withdrawn from sale. Denning retired,
and later apologised for writing what he
had — a sign that Kadri, while an object
of suspicion to conservatives in the Inns
of Court, was not a pariah. He earned his
views a hearing through sheer force of
argument, obliging his white colleagues
to notice the ways in which the suppos-
edly impartial legal system systemati-
cally mistreated ethnic minorities.
That the Bar listened to his message
is reflected in the fact that, in 1989, Kad-
ri became Britain’s first Muslim Queen’s
Counsel, and eight years later was ap-
pointed a bencher of the Inner Temple.
Sibghatullah Kadri was born in Bu-
daun, a city in the Indian state of Uttar
Pradesh, in 1937. The family, middle
class and devoutly Islamic, moved to
Pakistan in 1949, two years after parti-
tion. Kadri later said that, in moving, he
was “losing my childhood as I had to
leave my close friends behind”. The
Kadris expected a comfortable life in
Pakistan. Instead, in Karachi, Sibghat,
his parents and his seven siblings
shared a single room.
In 1956 he enrolled at Karachi Uni-
versity to read chemistry and mathe-
matics, and became active in student
politics. Elected the head of the stu-
dents’ union, he spoke out against the
martial law of President Ayub Khan.
He was initially a diffident speaker, but
soon found that he could quell hisBefore defending a group alleged to
have taken part in the Bristol riots, he
and his team requested that the compo-
sition of the jury be changed to better
reflect the ethnic diversity of the popu-
lation. This use of “peremptory chal-
lenge” had centuries of precedent, but
that did not deter the criticism of Lord
Denning, the Master of the Rolls.
In his 1982 book What Next in the
Law, Denning accused Kadri and his
team of “packing” the jury with “col-
oured” jurors, many of whom — he
alleged — came from countries “wherebribery and graft are accepted as inte-
gral parts of life”. Denning argued that
juries should no longer be selected at
random because “the English are no
longer a homogenous race. They are
white and black, coloured and brown.
They no longer share the same stan-
dards of conduct.”
Kadri, in his capacity as chairman of
the Society of Black Lawyers, called for
Denning’s resignation, saying that his
remarks were “virulent enough to de-
stroy any remaining credibility he may
have as an unbiased and impartial in-
terpreter of the law”.Lord Denning accused
him of packing the jury
with ‘coloured’ jurors
| yObituaries
Sibghatullah Kadri
Britain’s first Muslim QC as well as founder of the first multiracial chambers and recipient of a rare apology by the Master of the Rolls
Kadri when he was a BBC newsreader, and with Cherie Blair at No 10 in the 1990s“starry-eyed”. He felt privileged to be
training in the same rooms as Gandhi,
Nehru and Jinnah, the architects of In-
dian independence.
While studying for his Bar exams he
worked as a postman, a clerk and a wait-
er in an Indian restaurant in Kilburn
where, one evening in 1963, a white cus-
tomer slashed his face with a knife after
refusing to pay his bill.
That year he married Carita Idman, a
Finnish au pair. They had two children,
Sadakat, who became a barrister and
writer, and Maria, who went on to work
in local government and as a teacher.
All survive him.
In 1964 he took a job as a newsreader
for the BBC Urdu service. Embarking
on his Bar finals course in 1968, he
helped set up the Bar Reform Commit-
tee. Having won the right to unionise,
he defeated John Laws, the lord justice
of appeal to be, to become the president
of the Inner Temple Students’ Associa-
tion. When he next went into the BBC
offices he was told he would no longer
be reading the news because “you are
the news”.
His next appearance in the headlines
was in 1970 when, at a rally to protest
against the murder of a Bengali immi-
grant in London’s East End, he remind-
ed the crowd that the law allowed them
to defend themselves. He told a Daily
Telegraph reporter that while the Asian
community was not looking for trouble,
“they will be ready to deal with it”. For
this he was sacked from his second job
at the Urdu service, where he had been
presenting a magazine show.
In 1971 he was offered pupillage by
Lord Anthony Gifford. Despite this
break, he struggled to get tenancy, so in
1973 founded his own chambers.
Not once in his career did he
prosecute because, he said, he
wanted to direct his efforts to de-
fending those he felt the legal
system did not allow a fair hearing.
“It is wrong to say that a lawyer is
just a cog in a machine,” he said.
“The question is which part of the
machine do you want to assist?”
In court, Kadri was a fierce and
deep-voiced rhetorician. He once
brought a jury to tears by comparing
a group of Kosovans, who had used
fake Italian identity cards to escape
their country’s conflict, to Jews flee-
ing the Holocaust. “He was a tiger,”
said his friend the barrister Arthur
Blake, “but he had a soft underbelly.”
After receiving news of his death,
the Inner Temple flew its flag at half-
mast. When an extension to its trea-
sury building is finished next year, a
photograph of Kadri will hang there,
commemorating him as Britain’s first
Muslim QC.
Last year, reflecting on how attitudes
to race in the legal profession had
changed across his career, Kadri said:
“The situation is vastly improved. A
generation of lawyers has grown to ma-
turity knowing racism to be wrong.
There’s still plenty to be done — only
recently, it was in the news that a black
barrister was mistaken for a defendant,
after all — but it’s impossible to believe
that things will ever be as bad again.”Sibghatullah Kadri, Queen’s Counsel, was
born on April 23, 1937. He died of cancer on
November 2, 2021, aged 84p
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nerves by marshalling facts. In 1958 he ph
was jailed for seven months for his op-
position to Khan. He drafted his own
writ of habeas corpus, submitted it to
the Pakistani high court, and secured
his release, but was barred from com-
pleting the final year of his studies. In
1960 his sister, already in England, was
seriously injured in a fire. The entire
Kadri family came to visit her in hospi-
tal. Although she died two weeks later,
they remained.
In 1961 he was admitted to the Inner
Temple even though he did not have an
entrance qualification, on the basis that
he should not be punished twice for his
activism. He later recalled that this ini-
tial view of the legal profession was