Contribution
Time and again, for more than a year now, Ministers have come to the Dispatch Box and told the House that their attack on jury trials was essential to making the courts work efficiently. Time and again we told them that they were wrong, and so did more than 100 of their colleagues on the Government Benches. We said that the right to a trial by jury is an ancient English right—a vital part of our national inheritance and a necessary safeguard against the might of the state.
Ministers ignored us and said that we did not understand. They briefed against their colleagues and, in the case of the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East (Karl Turner), they smeared him disgracefully. Now they admit that they were wrong and we were right. All those Ministers and Labour MPs who stuck to the Government line in the face of all the evidence should reflect on the limits of blind party allegiance and following the instructions of their Whips. It makes them look very foolish today.
I remind the Courts Minister in particular of our exchange in the House in June. When I told her that the incoming leader of the Labour party, now the Prime Minister, was going to scrap her prized policy, she told the House that I misunderstood his position. She said that the right hon. Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham) did not in fact oppose their assault on jury trials. Yet here they are, with their policy largely abandoned, and her authority as Courts Minister lies in pieces.
Like Monty Python’s Black Knight, the Courts Minister declared in June, “I move for no man.” As her policy lost one limb, she insisted it was but a scratch. As it lost another, she claimed it was just a flesh wound. Now that the Bill is left completely dismembered, she has gone from insisting, “I am invincible,” to finally saying, “All right, we’ll call it a draw.” But it is not a draw; it is a very serious defeat, and it is a victory for our constitutional settlement, our rights under the Crown and the sacred principle that no one shall be convicted and deprived of their liberty except by a jury of their peers.
This was a battle that should never have been fought. In the last year, 17,601 sitting days were lost because Crown courtrooms sat empty. On average, about 16% of Crown courts are not sitting on any given day. We have repeatedly called on the Government to get the courts sitting throughout the year. That is how they should cut backlogs, not by attacking juries.
I said that the attack on juries had been largely abandoned, but the Government have not completely given up. There remain serious problems with the Bill, which will remove the right of defendants to elect a jury in either-way cases and increase the sentencing power of magistrates courts so that more cases are heard there. However, the magistrates backlog has reached 380,000 open cases—a 9% increase on the previous year. The Government have not told us what additional resources will be given to magistrates to manage the increase in workload, nor what new safeguards will ensure justice. Indeed, there has been no assessment of the likely effect of the change on appeal rates. We know that of appeals against verdicts given by magistrates, up to 56% are allowed.
The Bill will also remove juries from what it calls complex and lengthy trials, which are normally said to be cases involving fraud. The independent reviewer of fraud, Jonathan Fisher KC, concluded that there was no justification for the change. But clause 4 does not only concern fraud trials; the Government seek to extend the scope of judge-only trials to other complex cases in later years by secondary legislation. That would give them the power to resume their attack on jury trials without proper scrutiny or debate. The proposal is a disgrace and we reject it emphatically.
The Bill as amended will also establish a review of the court system with a specific remit to consider inequality of outcome based on racial identity. Once again, the Labour party is trying to engineer judicial outcomes based on identity rather than treating us all as free individuals accountable before the law. The Opposition will resist that and stand for the principle that it is only our actions that matter, not who and what we are.
Opposition Members are committed to the ancient right to trial by jury, but while the principle of jury trials is sacrosanct, there is increasing evidence from recent cases that juries may, in some examples, have been compromised by the political or religious bias of some jury members. We have seen the acquittal of violent thugs, including the man who smashed a female police officer’s spine apparently because he was a member of Palestine Action. We have seen vandals from Just Stop Oil found not guilty despite clear evidence of their guilt.
Many in the legal profession are concerned that this is an increasing trend in courts across the country. If those who break our laws walk free because jurors feel kinship towards them or because the cause for which the defendant committed a crime is just, justice is no longer blind. That flies in the face of the rule of law. It must be stopped.