Jury Trials

 

Last week saw the budget – an outrageous assault on working people, but something we've sadly come to expect of our socialist government.

Darker, and far more insidious, is Labour's timing in announcing proposals for the curtailment of trial by jury – the day before the budget, knowing full well that it would take the limelight off this most egregious assault on our civil liberties.

Since 1215, under clause 39 of the Magna Carta, it has been law that “No free man shall be… imprisoned… except by the lawful judgment of his peers.” Labour have just advocated throwing out a fundamental safeguard of our liberties that has been law for over 800 years.

Under their proposals, the right to trial by jury for many “either way” offences will be removed. What is especially alarming is the direction of travel this implies for the near future. Once the government normalises trying a broad class of offences without a jury, there is nothing to prevent the scope from expanding further. Either-way offences are, by their nature, flexible categories. If a government wishes to shift more and more conduct into the summary track, it simply needs to legislate for reclassification, redefine harm thresholds, or create new offences that sit just below the line required for jury trial. The legal mechanism is straightforward; the political cost, once the precedent has been set, is minimal.

This is particularly concerning when viewed alongside the Online “Safety” Act. Under this act, a citizen can be charged with “false communications” or “threatening communications” based on nothing more than an online post that the government decides is harmful or misleading. At present, some of these offences are summary and some triable either way – but if Labour’s proposed reforms are enacted, those cases would increasingly be decided by a single state-appointed judge rather than a panel of ordinary citizens. And once the state has the power to classify expressive offences as summary matters, it becomes trivially easy for future governments to ensure that politically sensitive speech cases never reach a jury at all.

Only a truly authoritarian regime would ever even consider such a proposal. In case the reader is unsure of this, let’s take a look at a list of recent leaders that abolished trial by jury:

• Vladimir Lenin: 1917–1922

• Benito Mussolini: 1931

• Adolf Hitler: 1934

• Francisco Franco: 1939

• Mao Zedong: 1949

• Fidel Castro: 1959

• Pol Pot: 1975

• Idi Amin: 1971–1972

• Saddam Hussein: 1970s

• Muammar Gaddafi: 1973

• Ayatollah Khomeini: 1979

• Hugo Chávez: 1999 (intensified under Maduro)

• Keir Starmer: 2025.