Trial by Ordeal in Modern Britain.
I lunched in London yesterday with a group of girlfriends. We met at one of those fancy private members’ clubs. The views were to die for and you could feed a family of four for the price of one main course.
That doesn’t sound much like a trial so far, does it? Quite right. The only trialling aspect was my awareness that I definitely cannot afford to join a private members’ club. Otherwise it was all perfectly lovely.
However, I don’t know about your lunches and dinners, but in the company I keep the conversation tends to fall to everything that has gone wrong in modern Britain. You can dine out endlessly on how diabolically depressing our country has become.
As a little amuse bouche, one of the girls told us about a challenging experience the night before. She’d been out — to another private members’ club, no less — and then found she couldn’t get a cab home. No Ubers. No black cabs. This used to be unthinkable; there was a time when you could reliably flag a black cab at any hour of the night. Instead she had to take a blaring, glaring tuk tuk from central London to Hampstead. A cold, slow journey that set her back £70.
I think tuk tuks are one of the worst blight’s on the modern London landscape — and now they are the only way home!
After lunch I walked another girl to the station. She doesn’t know London very well and wasn’t sure of her way, but she also didn’t want to get her phone out to look at the map. That’s our capital city — a place where you fear using your own phone in public.
Over lunch, the conversation had ranged from inflation to illegal immigration. What struck me was the sense that simply living in our country is becoming a trial by ordeal. We may not be forced to walk over hot coals or be thrown into icy ponds, yet in a metaphorical version of those medieval tests it is nevertheless painful to watch the decline of our once-great country,
There’s another reason trial by ordeal has been on my mind: the leak of a briefing document by Justice Secretary David Lammy, revealing proposals to restrict jury trials to only the most serious offences. According to reports, the government wants to replace the majority of Crown Court jury trials with a new judge-led system, supposedly to tackle the catastrophic backlog. Estimates suggest that under these proposals 75% to 95% of cases currently heard by juries would instead be decided by a judge alone.
I cannot stress enough how extraordinary and dangerous this is. Trial by jury is not some decorative legal custom: it is a fundamental feature of who we are as a nation. Its roots run back to Anglo-Saxon and Norman traditions and over time it has developed precisely to protect ordinary people from the concentration of power in the hands of the state. A jury of peers prevents injustice in a way no remote judicial elite ever could, especially not an elite which feels increasingly political. Trial by jury is a democratic safeguard as important as the ballot box.
Even Lammy himself, in his own review of racism in the criminal justice system in 2017, found that jury trials were the only part of the system consistently free from racial bias. And now, astonishingly, he appears prepared to dismantle the very safeguard he once praised.
MPs from both sides were in uproar. Lo and behold, within 48 hours of the leak, there were suddenly reports that the government might water down the plans. This is a well-known behavioural tactic. Threaten an extreme measure, then offer back a softened version. The foot in the door. The boiling frog. The shifting Overton window. People breathe a sigh of relief — and then accept a compromise they never would have tolerated at the outset.
The key here is to stop compromising. Don’t be centrist, however safe that sounds. Don’t be agreeable, even though that sounds nice. Just say no.
No.
No. We do not accept this change to our justice system. That is not who we are.
Fix the backlog, don’t break the system.
How do we know that these plans were not the end, rather the beginning? Once you accept that most juries can be replaced by judges, it is only a matter of time before all juries go. If the government is prepared to tear up centuries of legal tradition because it failed to invest properly in the courts, what other constitutional protections might be next?
We’ve seen the pattern elsewhere. People in pain? Assisted suicide must be the answer! No. Fix palliative care. Women need abortion up to term decriminalised because a handful of cases involved late use of pills? No. Ensure abortion pills are properly prescribed by qualified professionals. Courts overwhelmed? No. Invest in judges, staff and buildings. Provide the resources the system needs.
We suffer yet another classic ordeal: the slow dripping water torture of unwanted changes repetitively and painfully forced on us.
All of these changes convert our government, justice and healthcare systems into something more technocratic, less human. One fears this is the point.
We cannot keep accepting it. We cannot keep being grateful when a terrible idea returns as a merely bad one. We do not agree. We do not accept. We say no. That is not who we are.
All fair but shocked by your sexism at calling your friends "girls"! How terrible you must be!
Seriously, juries are a very important part of our society and must stay BUT the same problem that afflicts our democracy (partisanship, mostly by immigrants) also affects our trials - who would expect a Muslim immigrant charged with rape to be convicted by a mostly Moslem jury (would not even require many prejudiced Moslems to get him off).
The answer to these, and to so many of our country's issues, is the same one - repatriation (not deportation) of millions of recent immigrants starting with the illegals and the criminals. Admittedly we will have to stop 'sponsoring' the workshy amongst the natives as well but big changes are required, and now.
It is depressing that, for the wrong reasons, the National Front might have been right all those years ago.
I keep asking myself the same question, over and over, and I've been asking it for many years now - "Where is all the money going?" We cannot pay to make the NHS work, we cannot fix the potholes in the road, we cannot afford a decent sized military, we couldn't afford the winter fuel allowance, and now we cannot afford to maintain trial by jury, etc., etc. I know, I know, we spend loads' on NHS "managers" and their packages, we spend on HS2, we pay for thousands of illegals, we now are going to pay much more for large familly child benefits, and so on and so forth. But,...... I sense it, I smell it, I somehow know it, much of our wealth is being diverted away from us into some other black hole or some cause we would never have agreed to and so it is kept secret from us. Even after all these "savings", it is not enough to finance the country. No, we even have to borrow massively and so have a national debt of trillions. Where IS all our money going? I mean really,.... where the F---k is it all going? Who is signing off the nation's finances every year? Is this happening at all. Where is the real check on our "spending?" There isn't one is there. They can spend spend spend and rob us all of however much they feel like. There is nothing to prevent them.