At a joint UCL Labour Rights Institute – Institute of Employment Rights (IER) event, Lord Hendy KC, discussed his noteworthy career.
Professor Keith Ewing asks how it all started. “I never wanted to be a lawyer”, exclaimed Lord Hendy KC to a room of people glad that he changed his mind. Among them was Judge Jennifer Eady KC, his former junior, who emphasised that many labour lawyers owed their careers to Hendy. He is also unusual for having so many admirers outside of his professional circle; in 2019 Prime Minister resignation honours, he received a life peerage after being nominated by Jeremy Corbyn.
Born in 1948, John Hendy was the maternal grandson of a hereditary peer. Yet it was his father who loomed largest over John’s future trajectory. A trade unionist and a lecturer in labour law, his father’s interests propelled John first to a law degree at Ealing Technical College, and then to a master’s degree in labour law at Queen’s Belfast. However, not all credit should not go to his father; he recalled how a lecture given by Peter Pain, the High Court judge and labour law specialist, in 1969 made him think “this is what I want to do.” Hendy’s politics were formed in these years, and he thinks it as self-evident then as it was to him now that labour law is fundamentally a theatre of conflict between labour and capital. His late-1960s student years were punctuated with a series of high-profile employment law cases, and the mood among the fellow students was one of increasingly activist agitation. It is no surprise that instead of moving straight into tenancy following a successful pupillage at Old Square Chambers, he spent the next three years establishing a law centre in Newham.
His first case on returning to Old Square involved a cab running a red light. This was not yet the politically charged work of his later career, yet Hendy takes the time to stress the importance of the cab-rank rule, and dispels any misapprehensions about it being easy to become a “radical progressive lawyer.” When you do legal cases, you do the best for your client, since “no one is paying you to do a revolution.” Gradually Hendy’s views about what an advocate could realistically achieve regarding societal change became more optimistic, but even presently he sells his own success short I think. Whilst early on in a barrister’s career the room for manoeuvre may be slight, and the advisability of becoming strongly attached to client limited, as one’s status within the profession swells and one’s specialist knowledge becomes well-known among potential clients, there is (as Hendy’s career shows) a real opportunity to pursue political goals through the law. Whilst judges often remain as the focus when discussing the intersection of law and politics, barristers who chose their cases carefully and advocate effectively can be equally influential in setting legal precedents.
Hendy once conducted a full client consultation session inside a cab circling around the same street repeatedly, for fear of being overheard in public or having the conservation bugged in his chambers office. This of course formed part of a series of 1980s trade union cases which brought him personally very close to the National Union of Mineworkers leadership, and into continual opposition to the Thatcher government. In defending the unions John was, in essence, actively attempting to change the law. After losing one particular case, a law reporter ran up to Hendy and asked whether it was worth mentioning his use of article 11 of the European Convention of Human Rights, since the final judgment did not reference it. Hendy said that of course the law report should include it, because he knew he would return to litigate on this issue in the future.
His career shows what can be achieved by a creative and thoughtful lawyer with “quite a long horizon,” and his argument about the right to collective bargaining being protected under article 11 was vindicated in Wilson and Palmer v United Kingdom [2002] ECHR 552, in which Hendy acted for Mr Wilson, a National Union of Journalists member.
“Any lessons learnt?” Professor Ewing queries. Hendy laughs. After all, he seems to have always known one thing: that it is not enough to just pick up your brief, plead the case, and go home. All good barristers should work towards law reform; for Hendy, litigation was a tool he wielded effectively to essentially change the law regarding trade unions. Obviously being a barrister is already an onerous profession, so Hendy advises anyone going the extra-mile to take a holiday from time to time.
Most vacations probably won’t look like Hendy’s trip to Cuba, where on the insistence of the National Union of Mineworkers he toured dissident South African trade unionists (including one Cyril Ramaphosa) around the Communist nation’s mines and enjoyed an evening of drinking rum with Fidel Castro. “Contemplating a retirement”, I doubt he’ll go back to Havana. With his seat in the House of Lords and the current debate around employment rights legislation, no doubt this labour law specialist has much more to say.
Edward is currently studying the Graduate Diploma in Law and is a member of the Lawbore Journalist Team 2025/26. He studied history at undergraduate level, during which he became particularly interested in legal history, which in turn led him to pursue a career in law. Family and land law are two of his particular interests, and he hopes to practice in these areas in the future.