While new problems are constantly introduced, the greatest questions of good governance were settled — and often at a huge cost of blood and treasure — many centuries ago. Defence of the realm far predates the welfare state, just as the necessity of fair courts predates the establishment of a fire brigade, or even a police force.
And yet we seem to be living at the mercy of politicians and administrators suffering from recency bias, where the very foundation stones of a just nation are neglected to the point of collapse while the most newfound obligations are treated as utterly sacrosanct. So what is a government even for?
Much ink has been spilt on the insanity of Britain, an island nation, being so greatly reduced as a naval power, and its total inability to enforce its own borders against waves of migrant boatmen. So much for defence of the realm as an original purpose of government! But what of law? Now we are confronted with yet another attack upon ourselves, an act of astonishing constitutional vandalism, as we learn the UK’s left-wing Labour government’s justice minister David Lammy has decided to do away with trial by jury except in cases of alleged murder, manslaughter, and rape.
Instead of cases being heard by a judge and a jury of 12 peers, Lammy’s proposal thinks the answer is a single judge to hear and rule on all but the most serious cases, a notion of which The Times leader warns: “Returning to the 15th-century era of the ‘Star Chamber’, where judges alone heard cases, would be met with grave public apprehension”.
Indeed. The Star Chamber, of course, was a grossly abused device of government power in 17th century whose cruelties are why the United States of America has the fifth and sixth amendments. Something for Americans to be thankful for on this Thanksgiving day.
We even have an opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court which reminds us the Star Chamber was “efficient” yet “arbitrary”, and “for centuries symbolized disregard of basic individual rights”. And it is this ‘efficiency’ that recommends the notion to Lammy, it seems.
Indeed, there is no doubt something has to change in Britain’s criminal justice system. The courts have been woefully inadequate for the ever-larger case load put upon them for many years, and factors including the Covid-era shutdowns, criminal investigations becoming more technical and complex, and underfunding have all contributed to an enormous backlog. Said to be approaching 80,000 cases, at the present dispersal rate this could take decades to clear.
But it is obvious a choice is being made at the highest levels of government. There is a quite simply astonishing amount of money inside the British state, and the justice system — which any rational person might believe is a core role of government — accounts for a tiny fraction of spending. Faced with a choice between clearing the case backlog by doing more justice, or by cutting the list by doing worse justice, Lammy inclines to the latter.
Today, the government moved to defend the plan by insisting that in Magna Carta the promise is not just of trial by jury, but to “timely” justice, this selective quoting making a fast answer at court, rather than an unimpeachable one, the priority. This offers us as much reassurance as Britain’s notoriously long NHS hospital waiting lists being cleared by offering surgery without a full operating theatre team: the lone surgeon must remember to disinfect his own tools, and keep a weather-eye on the anaesthetist’s valve even as he cuts.
It has been written that, during the dark old days of nationalised industry in Britain, that its national train network British Rail so often failed the public because, as a huge and centralised bureaucracy, it was too often run by railwaymen for railwaymen, rather than for the public. And so it goes today, with this government of lawyers for lawyers, with the ancient safety-valve of the common sense of the common man in court on the verge of being removed to put even more power in the hands of lawyers.
This Labour government has made habit of running pet projects up the flagpole to see what is saluted and what pilloried. Radically changing the electorate by introducing votes-at-16 somehow made it through, while trying to balance the books did not. So the best we can hope for now is opposition both public and political to put this authoritarian idea to bed.
Fortunately, opposition may have something of a bipartisan character. As reported, senior Labour lawyer Baroness Kennedy KC, the director of the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute, pointed out killing jury trial was tried by the last Labour government in 1999, and it failed then. By her reckoning, this attempt is being pushed on Lammy by “old Blairites inside the government” trying to achieve what they failed at 25 years ago.
Baroness Kennedy said the desire to kill trial by jury is founded in a deep-seated feeling among some in the left that normal people aren’t bright enough to be involved. She said: “It’s been a Labour trope — don’t trust the ordinary citizen. It is a shocking display of thinking ordinary people are not up to it.”
Quite. And one might very well consider the state of the consciences of politicians who accuse their (perfectly mainstream) political opponents of being even fascists or neo-Nazis with one breath and then argue in favour of suspending one of the oldest rights of Englishmen with the next. Still, at the very least it gives lie to those salacious claims: can anyone really think David Lammy seriously believes Britain is on the verge of a far-right coup if the groundwork he’s laying for that is abolishing trial by jury in favour of the Star Chamber, that ancient tool of the despot?
To return to where we started, what is government actually for? If it’s for smashing the very foundations upon which it stands, one might very well ask whether we’re better off with it or not. And to my American cousins, happy Thanksgiving day. I beg you look across the Atlantic and know just how much you have to be thankful for.
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