BRITAIN has returned to the “bad old days” of the Birmingham Six, with corrupt judges and police swapping Irish people for black and Muslim communities, top defence lawyers have said.

Fifty years on, the lessons from that monumental miscarriage of justice have “all been eroded” with senior judges back to pushing for guilty verdicts, an anniversary event in Parliament heard.

Renowned solicitor for the six men wrongly convicted of the 1974 terrorist pub bombing, Gareth Peirce, warned “frightening signals” by the Court of Appeal since their sensational 1991 acquittals have led to the “self-imposed censorship” of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) watchdog.

She described how police and prosecutors have found “endlessly innovative” ways to subvert laws which were originally passed to prevent the state framing innocent people for terrorist attacks during the Troubles.

Ms Peirce said the “halcyon” days following the Court of Appeal’s quashing of those wrongful convictions, based on false confessions through police brutality, were over.

“The authorities can distort science in just the same way,” she told MPs, lawyers, victims and campaigners on Thursday.

“There are a number of cases going on at the present on the basis of encrypted and decrypted telephone evidence which authorities penetrated.”

She said this has led to hundreds of cases being wrongly prosecuted, claiming evidence was not captured “in transmission” — the digital equivalent of a wire tap.

British laws mean only data stored in a mobile can be used as evidence in trial, she explained.

“The safeguards for provisions erected for certain periods of time are now being distorted to bring prosecutions of convenience so it's the same story,” she said.

“It’s the same if it's another community that is suspect: anything goes, anything is justified, the court won't interfere, the jurors will think it's their duty to convict.

“It’s just achieved in a rather different way — not by brutality for forced confessions but by ingenuous presenting of constructs.

“Individuals from communities that have different customs, different faiths, different ways of looking at things — it’s easy to distort those and present to a jury.”

She added: “The experience I and others have had are of ‘back to the bad old days’ of judges helping to push a guilty verdict in these kinds of cases.

“The Court of Appeal isn’t as it once was, in its mind to the possiblity of quashing convictions.

“The court is sending out frightening signals to the CCRC: ‘don’t send us, don't send us or else we are going to do the right thing.’

“The self-imposed censorship of the CCRC — it’s a circularity which is taking it back a really demoralised, depressed psyche for those who are working on trying to undo convictions.”

The meeting hosted by Labour MP Kim Johnson also heard from Lucy Letby’s barrister Mark McDonald, who said that she is one of four “innocent” nurses jailed for life following jury trials.

Former MP and investigative journalist Chris Mullin, whose work was key to identifying three of the four real Birmingham bombing participants, said: “I can’t put my hand on my heart say that she’s necessarily innocent but I can say it’s not been proved beyond reasonable doubt and it looks like it’s unravelling.

“I think the medical Establishment and legal Establishment will fight like hell for those convictions but the case against her … is only circumstantial and I think eventually that will unravel.”

The Court of Appeal is due to rule on a combined 41-year jail term for environmental protesters tomorrow.

President of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers Michael Mansfield KC, who worked the Birmingham Six case, said: “Slowly and surely it’s all been eroded.

“The caseload for individual caseworkers has doubled recently.

“There’s another bigger reason and that is the attitude of the Court of Appeal changed towards the CCRC.

“I think the CCRC needs a complete reconstruction.”

Alastair Logan, a solicitor for the Guildford 4, who were also wrongly convicted of IRA attacks, said: “If the case is serious enough, terrorist or something of that order, then that will happen.

“We had a world-renowned forensic system in this country. The beancounters, the Treasury, destroyed it in 2010. 

“I don’t think [the police] have the tools to be able to detect whether somebody has prejudices which are going to affect the way they carry out their duties.”

A campaigner for Say No to Joint Enterprise said six young black men came close to being wrongly convicted for a murder they didn’t commit last month.

Following their acquittals by jurors, she said that the police tried to pressure a witness into giving a description of the defendants likely to sway a jury against them, visiting his house three times without body-worn cameras, and “lying” telling one that their evidence would not be used in court.