Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1998 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My cast away this week is a lawyer, a passionate defender of civil rights and an advocate of constitutional change,

she's never allowed her suspicion of convention to act as a barrier to success.

She was born into a close working-class family in Glasgow

and entered the ins of court where old-fashioned attitudes and prejudice against her sex

only served to fuel her radicalism.

She took cases concerned with domestic violence. only served to fuel her radicalism.

She took cases concerned with domestic violence, race and clashes between strikers and police.

She helped defend the Guilford Four and one of the men accused of the Warrington bombing.

In 1992, she published a now famous critique of the British legal

system entitled Eve was framed. A day in court is enough to convince most men and women that

the legal system is a foreign country, she

wrote.

Today, as a QC and a newly created peer of the realm, she intends to carry her reforming zeal into the

upper house.

She is Helena Kennedy. Now Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws, which is a wonderfully

lyrical title. Which Shaws? Where what? Oh, Shaws, S-H-A-A-W-S and it's the south side of Glasgow and it's where I spent most of my childhood and where my mother

still lives.

So lyrical for you, but perhaps not for us?

Lyrical for me.

The most remarkable thing about your career is that you an outsider have succeeded in penetrating all the way to the heart of the establishment, you know, from the Glasgow tenement, you a female, all the way to the House of Lords.

...