Jury Trial Bombshell Just Left the Government Reeling

Right, so you always know the country’s in trouble when a government starts calling a constitutional right an “efficiency problem”, because that’s how you sell something you’d never dare say plainly. And that’s what’s happening now with jury trials. They’ve taken a backlog they created through court closures, CPS collapse and a decade of cuts, and decided the real issue is the public being in the room. So instead of fixing the system, they’re cutting the public out of it. And the pitch is almost impressive in its shamelessness: this isn’t the erosion of a centuries-old safeguard, it’s just “modernisation”. It’s Diplock logic without even the honesty of acknowledging it, and you can see exactly where it leads. Because once ministers start deciding who gets a jury, you’re not protecting justice. You’re protecting power from scrutiny.
Right, so you can always tell when a government is about to do something that would never survive a straight conversation with the public because they stop talking like politicians and start talking like middle managers. And that’s exactly what’s happening right now with jury trials. Nobody in government is willing to say, plainly, that they’re removing the public from criminal justice. Nobody is willing to say they’re taking a right that has existed for centuries and turning it into a privilege. Nobody will say they’re rewiring the justice system so the state can judge the public without the public being in the room. So instead they call it “modernisation”, “efficiency”, “reducing the backlog”, as if justice is a logistics chain and the real problem is that twelve ordinary people have the audacity to want to participate in it.
And when you strip away the managerial gloss, the reforms are brutally clear. They want a new Crown Court division where a judge and two magistrates hear either-way cases that currently go to juries. They want to remove your right to insist on a jury if the maximum sentence is two years or less. They want judge-only trials for “complex” fraud and bribery. They want to expand the guilty-plea discount so people plead early to avoid the risk of trial. And they want a “public interest test” empowering ministers to decide which cases deserve juries at all. It’s not a technical tweak. It’s a constitutional shift disguised as a scheduling exercise.
The justification is the backlog. There are roughly 80,000 cases waiting in the Crown Court, and ministers want you to believe that juries are the cause. But if that were true, the data would show a system delayed by jurors, not a system delayed by the government. The real reasons are obvious and documented: court closures, caps on judicial sitting days, a CPS so understaffed it regularly fails to serve evidence, and legal aid so gutted that people are turning up to court with no representation and no ability to navigate the system. That’s the backlog. It’s political neglect wearing a wig. And instead of repairing the damage, the government has decided to redefine the problem as the existence of public oversight.
And this is where your alarm bells should start ringing, because jury trials are more than a tradition. They’re the one part of the criminal justice system that doesn’t belong to the state. Police belong to the state. Prosecutors belong to the state. Judges work inside the state’s architecture. Magistrates too. But juries? Juries are the moment where power has to step outside its own echo chamber and prove its case to people who don’t accept institutional assumptions. They’re the public’s presence in a system otherwise run entirely by insiders. And if you want to know why governments find juries inconvenient, the answer is simple: juries don’t automatically believe the official version of events.
You only need to look at conviction rates to see the difference. Magistrates convict far more often than juries. Not because they’re biased, but because they work closely with the police and CPS, hear the same narratives every day, and absorb the culture of the institutions around them. That’s how systems work; people become aligned with the environment they operate in. Juries don’t have that alignment. They bring their lives into the room — their scepticism, their common sense, their instinct for proportion. And that’s exactly what the government wants less of.
Because once you strip juries out of thousands of cases, you create a justice system that’s easier for the state to run and harder for ordinary people to defend themselves in. And the expanded guilty-plea discount only tightens that screw. A forty per cent sentence reduction for pleading guilty early is being sold as efficiency, but everyone who has ever been near a court knows what it really is: pressure. If you’re poor, if you’re young, if you’re from a racialised community, if you can’t gamble on the risk of a harsher sentence, you take the deal even when you’re innocent. And the government then points to the rising guilty-plea statistics as proof their reforms are working. But what it actually proves is that coercion is working exactly as intended.
And here’s the part politicians pray the public never notices: this country has done all of this before. It wasn’t called modernisation then. It was called emergency. In 1973, the government removed juries in Northern Ireland for “terrorist-related” cases. They said it was temporary. They said it was exceptional. They said it was necessary. And the Diplock system as this was called, lasted thirty-four years. The list of offences expanded. Cases with political edge slid into the non-jury stream. Miscarriages of justice mounted. Public trust collapsed. And when the Good Friday Agreement finally dismantled the system, it did so explicitly because non-jury justice corrodes legitimacy. And even then, the state kept the ability to hold non-jury trials whenever it claimed a risk of jury intimidation.
That’s the lesson here. Once you create a mechanism for the state to remove juries, the list of qualifying cases grows. Exceptions become precedents. Precedents become norms. Norms become defaults. And before you know it, jury trial is something that exists in theory but barely functions in practice. That’s not speculation. It’s what happened the last time this government created a non-jury model.
And this is why the “public interest test” might be the most dangerous part of the entire package. Because when the executive decides who gets a jury, jury trial stops being a right. It becomes an allocation. It becomes a privilege granted to the cases ministers think deserve it. And once that principle is accepted, everything becomes contestable. Protest can be reframed as low-level disorder. Criminal damage can be defined as minor. Possession charges can be categorised as simple. Public order cases can be pushed into the non-jury pipeline with a single change to guidance. And the government will claim it’s all rational and proportionate because they’ve redesigned the system to make their own choices look like neutral administration.
And when you then look at who gets charged with these offences, the politics become impossible to deny. It won’t be wealthy defendants losing their right to a jury. It won’t be corporate offenders. It won’t be people with legal teams who can challenge every disclosure failure. It’ll be working-class communities, especially racialised ones. It’ll be young defendants already over-policed. It’ll be protesters. It’ll be people the system has historically treated with suspicion. And those are exactly the people for whom juries are most protective, because jurors understand the difference between an offence and an injustice. Judges and magistrates understand the difference between an offence and a precedent. Those are not the same thing.
And even if you wanted to take the most charitable view imaginable — if you wanted to believe the government’s intentions are entirely clean — the structure itself still creates the danger. Because in a country with a written constitution, you could challenge the reforms. You could appeal on the grounds of entrenched rights. But the UK has none of that. No constitutional court. No entrenched guarantees. No higher law protecting jury trial. Rights exist here because governments choose not to remove them. And when a government finally decides it wants to remove one, there’s nothing in the constitutional architecture that can stop it besides political resistance. And they are counting on that resistance not materialising.
And the silence right now is telling. Civil liberties groups have raised alarms, but the reaction is nowhere near the scale you’d expect for something this fundamental. Trade unions are quiet. Much of the legal profession is cautious. Activist groups are overwhelmed by other crises. And because it’s a Labour government doing this, too many people assume it must be reasonable. But rights don’t care which party takes them away. The loss is the same. The consequence is the same. And future governments will inherit the power whether you trust them or not.
And this is the part the government won’t say out loud: once you hollow out jury trial, you hollow out public legitimacy. Jury service connects the public to the justice system in a way nothing else does. It gives people a say. It gives the system credibility. It forces the state to justify itself. Remove that, and courts become opaque spaces where insiders decide outcomes without external pressure. People will still be convicted, but the social glue that makes those convictions acceptable dissolves. You can run a justice system without legitimacy for a while. But not forever. Decisions become suspect. Communities stop cooperating. Trust collapses. And once trust collapses, the whole system cracks.
And the really bleak part? All of this is completely avoidable. This is all down to political choice. The backlog didn’t require amputating jury trial. Reopening courtrooms would fix it. Restoring legal aid would fix it. Funding the CPS would fix it. Removing sitting-day caps would fix it. These reforms cost money. Stripping out juries doesn’t. So instead of repairing the system they broke, ministers have chosen the one option that shifts the cost from the Treasury onto the public. The government gets cheaper justice. Everyone else gets weaker justice. And don’t take my word for it, take Justice Secretary David Lammy, or at least his word back in 2020, because as Justice Secretary he’s singing from a different hymn sheet now. Back in 202 he tweeted out that:
‘Jury trials are a fundamental part of our democratic settlement. Criminal trials without juries are a bad idea. The Government need to pull their finger out and acquire empty public buildings across the country to make sure these can happen in a way that is safe.
We will work with the government on sensible proposals to deal with the backlog - which started long before Covid-19 because of underfunding. You don’t fix the backlog with trials that are widely perceived as unfair.’
I agree with 5 years ago Dave, not today’s Dave. More faces than a town clock.
So once you understand all of this, the euphemisms fall away. This isn’t modernisation. It isn’t efficiency. It isn’t backlog reduction. It’s the quiet removal of a democratic safeguard because it slows the state down. It’s the creation of a justice system more convenient for the government and more dangerous for the public. And once these changes are in place, they will not be undone in our lifetime. Because rights that depend on ministerial goodwill aren’t rights. They’re customs. And customs vanish the moment they become inconvenient.
And that’s the verdict. They’re not fixing justice. They’re centralising it. They’re not improving fairness. They’re managing risk — their risk, not yours. And once a government starts deciding who gets a jury and who doesn’t, justice stops belonging to the public and starts belonging to the state. And a justice system that answers only to itself isn’t a justice system. It’s a process. And a process without public oversight isn’t accountability. It’s control.
Along with control, Starmer’s regime seems to be a big fan of fear too – if you’re an asylum seeker of course and fat chance they get to see a jury in the 20 years before they can apply for permanent residency, so get the details of that story right here.
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