Jon Trickett

No. I have only five minutes, and I will have to move fast. The Deputy Prime Minister did convince me, and I am sure all of us, that there is a backlog, and it is not reasonable or fair, in terms of justice, that people should wait so long. Obviously, today we have heard some very powerful speeches from victims that reinforce the case. However, he has not shown to my satisfaction that the cause of the backlog is the juries. In fact, there is much evidence to show that they have a marginal impact at the most. The cause of the backlog is all sorts of things, including the failure of the courts to meet for long enough hours, as other working people have to do all over the country. Let me reflect for a moment—in a sense, going back to the basics—on why juries are in place, and I think it is to do with the fact that the Crown has the power, uniquely, to imprison people and deprive them of their liberty. No other organisation has that massively powerful capacity. The point is that, in a case where the Crown—or the Government, acting on behalf of the Crown—is operating in an unreasonable, unfair or even oppressive way, what the person facing imprisonment has is the jury system. Twelve people drawn from the citizenry of our country at random are able to speak together and make a final decision about whether the Crown has made out the case that that person should be imprisoned. That is a fundamental part of our constitutional system, and the idea that we should begin to abandon it is mistaken. Some hon. Members have said today that we have done similarly in the past, but making mistakes in the past does not at all justify continuing to make mistakes in the present. I have not heard the case made that juries are a bad thing in principle, although we are reducing them. One further point I want to raise is the question of how the backlog occurred. Again, no one has made the case that the backlog occurred because of some sort of permanent, strategic problem with the way our judicial system works. It is the product of a series of cuts by Governments of both parties, to be honest, and of a number of failures—there was privatisation, and all sorts of other issues. If those changes are contingent, rather than permanent, and a temporary problem that can be resolved, why are we destroying an element of the jury system? If the Deputy Prime Minister had said that the world and the country had changed, and that our way of looking at the judicial system had to be reformed, he might have had a case, although I would not necessarily agree with it. However, he has not said that. He has said that this is a contingent problem. When I was working for a living, I regularly used a ratchet—I do not know if the DPM has ever used one. A ratchet is a device that moves in only one direction. In the jury system, citizens have had, over centuries, a ratchet that gives protection from an oppressive Government. If the Deputy Prime Minister had come to the House and said that he was going to do some things that were extraordinary but temporary, to deal with the problems facing all victims, I might well have been prepared to listen to him. However, he has not said that; instead, he says that this will be a permanent change to the way that we do things. I am not convinced. This is oppressive, authoritarian and, quite honestly, much as I admire the Deputy Prime Minister, reactionary.