Few things unite our choleric right-wing press and the impeccably metropolitan soft-left liberal ‘elite’ it so despises. Curbing jury trials seems to be one of them.
‘Without a jury, a criminal courtroom is just a chamber full of state employees, trying to work out how long the defendant should go to prison for,’ the Daily Mail’s ever-readable Peter Hitchens warns.
‘It’s not jury trials that have left the justice system in crisis,’ bar chair Barbara Mills grumbles in the Guardian, preaching to a newspaper long since converted.
Now we hear that future juries are likely to decide only serious cases such as murder, rape or manslaughter. David Hardstaff, a serious and general crime partner at BCL Solicitors, speaks for many of his peers: ‘Curtailment of jury trials is nothing new but has generally been reserved for exceptional circumstances, such as war or force of terrorism. The idea of jury trials being pared back in peacetime suggests a failure of governance. It is a symptom of national crisis.’
In fact, it’s worse than that. Sinister, too, given the drift toward authoritarianism of a government nominally of the left.
After the second world war, Britain was exhausted, bankrupt and broken. In crisis, you might say. But we could still afford such indulgences as a National Health Service, legal aid and an embryonic welfare state. Justice, too.
Back then, however, we had a far higher calibre of politician – on all sides of the House.
‘Anything we can actually do, we can afford. We are immeasurably richer than our [19th-century] predecessors,’ declared John Maynard Keynes in 1942. Richer still, now – though it appears politically taboo to acknowledge this.
Lord Leveson warns that ‘wholesale reform’ is required to prevent total collapse of the criminal court system. That may be true, but it would be a more compelling argument had he held out the option of reverting to the status quo ante when the crisis is past. He didn’t.
I wonder, though. It’s an old trick for ministers to float the idea of a policy even more draconian than its prototype. Governments then secure plaudits – or at least grudging acceptance – when they backtrack to the original plan.
Is that what is going on here? Such cynical expediency may be the best we can hope for.
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