Lammy’s war on juries reveals Labour’s authoritarian heart

Getting rid of jury trials. Slapping us all with a digital ID. Presiding over a carnival of speech arrests. I’m starting to think the Guardianistas are right – that our current crop of politicians are indeed sending us down the slippery slope towards authoritarianism. Only it isn’t the ‘populists’ or the ‘right-wingers’ sluicing the flume, but their beloved bloody Labour Party.

I don’t know what’s worse about justice secretary David Lammy’s jury ‘reforms’ – that they will further curtail trial by jury, a right that stems from Magna Carta, or his spreadsheet-driven justifications for doing so. Forget about 1215 and Runnymede, we need to maybe trim the court backlog a bit. Our ancient liberties mean nothing to the technocrat with a target to hit.

In an effort to bring down that admittedly awful backlog, now more than 80,000 cases long, Lammy wants to scrap jury trials in cases where the sentence is likely to be three years or less, and for ‘either way’ cases in which a defendant can currently choose between having his guilt weighed by jury or by judge.

Never mind that no one seriously believes this will make a significant dent in the numbers, with only a small proportion of cases resulting in a jury trial as it is. Never mind that the public considers trial by jury to be a fundamental right, placing it second only behind universal healthcare. Never mind that this act of constitutional and democratic vandalism wasn’t in the Labour manifesto. Mastermind Lammy has other ideas.

The principled defence of juries – as a check on tyranny, as a safeguard against judicial prejudice, as a sturdy pillar of democratic life – has been well made in these pages, and elsewhere, ever since Lammy’s tentative plans were leaked to The Times. Indeed, Lammy himself was making many of these points five years ago, when the Tories briefly considered suspending jury trials during the Covid days, before high office politically lobotomised him. Someone should tell 2020 Lammy what 2025 Lammy is up to. He’ll be fuming. He might even chain himself to the Royal Courts of Justice.

But we need not quote Magna Carta – which declared that ‘no free man shall be seized or imprisoned… except by the lawful judgement of his peers’ – to make our point. Just imagine landing yourself in court, perhaps because you said something obnoxious on social media, only to find a sole judge deciding your fate, rather than 12 men and women – your fellow citizens. Ordinary people get this implicitly, having not had their instinct for liberty and capacity for common sense educated out of them, as our supposed betters in SW1 apparently have.

We were given a crash course in the crucial importance of juries after the Southport riots last summer, when the state decided that inflammatory social-media posts had to be crushed as firmly as the rioting. Northampton childminder Lucy Connolly and Welsh ex-soldier Jamie Michael were both prosecuted for ‘inciting racial hatred’ online. Connolly was given 31 months, and a lecture on ‘diversity’ by the beak. Michael walked free. And a jury trial may well have been the difference. Where Connolly pleaded guilty, in the vain hope of mercy, Michael pleaded not guilty, and withstood 17 days on remand, before being acquitted after just 17 minutes of jury deliberation, so obvious was it to 12 of his peers that he had done nothing deserving of a lengthy spell away from his young family.

Michael’s acquittal is the perfect demonstration of what Lord Devlin, judge and legal philosopher, meant when he said the jury trial offers ‘protection against laws which the ordinary man may regard as harsh and oppressive. It is a protection against tyranny.’ And it’s one Starmer’s Labour wants to strip from us.

It is striking what this Labour government does and does not deem sacred. Jury trials. Who needs them? Freedom of speech. But what about ‘Islamophobia’? But if you so much as look askance at the European Convention on Human Rights, if you so much as ask if this postwar treaty was really intended as a path to residency for foreign sex offenders, you’ll be accused of being a Nazi. This is a government that would sooner upend 800 years of liberty than repeal the Human Rights Act 1998. It clings to ‘human rights’ not because these conventions actually secure liberty, but because they limit democracy.

Jury trials remind us that democracy and liberty go hand in hand. Twelve ordinary men and women are a better safeguard against tyranny than the most immaculately credentialed judge could ever be; just as ordinary people are infinitely more keen on protecting their democratic rights than our authoritarian, Brexit-bashing betters. The wisdom of the crowd, against the haughty idiocy of David Lammy. I know which side I’m on.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater