More from Nick Cohen on the "Bottomless Vacuity" of the Starmer government

I quoted a tweet from Nick Cohen this morning about the proposed Labour curb on Jury Trials

He's also written a great piece on Substack about the issue.

He advertised it on X with the words

"The radical right rages that progressive elites want to take power from voters and give it to their chums.

Labour’s dismal achievement is to prove that the radical right is absolutely correct."

Here are some extracts from the Substack piece

"If you want to understand why “progressives” arouse such disdain, look at how Keir Starmer’s Labour party is threatening trial by jury.

It’s an object lesson in how bureaucratic politicians play into the hands of the radical right while spurning the working-class voters their predecessors once represented

Starmer and so many of his contemporaries are closer to HR managers than politicians. They think it is enough to mouth vaguely inclusive, vaguely leftish platitudes. And then when it really matters, when the time for decision comes, they deny ordinary people a voice and insist that the bosses know best.

All over the world populists rage that progressive elites want to take power from voters and give it to friends they meet at metropolitan dinner parties.

It is the dismal achievement of Britain’s Labour politicians to prove them right. They are indeed taking power from citizens, and giving it to vaguely leftish, upper-middle class judges who are just like them."

"For as long as I can remember the left has bemoaned the right’s ability to monopolise patriotism. Finally, after 14 years in opposition, Labour won power in 2024 without mentioning plans to take power from juries anywhere in its manifesto.

It then turned around and decided that a proper course for thoroughly modern leftists in the 2020s was to shrivel a democratic institution that dates back to before Magna Carta and was once at the heart of every progressive notion of Englishness.

Their stated reasons fall apart on close examination." 

"David Lammy, the Justice Secretary, told the House of Commons on Tuesday that on average it takes “255 days before a Crown court case gets heard and finishes. For rape, it is a staggering 423 days.”

If this attack on juries would end the law’s delays – or even significantly reduce them – Lammy and Starmer would have a case.

But a government impact study that says reducing jury trials will cut the Crown court workload by about 3.5% and the Conservatives claim that figure is almost certainly an overestimate."

"Labour does not need to do this. It is creating the strong suspicion that its real motive is to let the managerial class off the hook by blaming civil liberties for the failure of the civil service to run the justice system.

A smart centre-left with a functioning survival instinct would notice how grateful Conservatives are to receive a gift that will keep on giving for years to come. Since the French Revolution, they have claimed that liberals hate the best traditions of their country, and now Labour is proving them right.

On Tuesday, Nick Timothy, the Conservative justice spokesman, told the Commons that

“Today, the Government attacks an ancient English right that runs through our constitution, from Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights to trials taking place at this very moment in courts across the land. That right—that nobody should be seized, imprisoned or deprived of his standing in any way, except by the lawful judgment of his equals—is an essential part of our national inheritance.”

"If Starmer and Lammy do not understand how appeals to our ancient liberties stir the blood and move the heart, they have no business being in politics at such a dangerous time.

You would never guess from the bland authoritarians who now lead the party but Labour was once the heir to the religious dissenters, proto-democrats, trade unionists, and women’s rights campaigners, who used trial by jury to defend themselves against the state.

Today it is their successors in ethnic minorities who know perfectly well that they need juries to protect them from judges who are overwhelmingly white and privately educated.

David Lammy’s position is untenable, in my view, because he knows it too.

In 2017, Lammy chaired an independent review into racism in the criminal justice system. It found that juries put the judiciary to shame. Binna Kandola, a psychologist and adviser to Lammy, wrote that the jury system was “a notable success” story. In an analysis of nearly 400,000 cases, “the review found that juries were consistent in their decision-making, irrespective of the ethnicity of the defendant”.

"What had changed?

The answer appears to be that power corrupted Labour’s leaders within months of taking office, and they didn’t even attempt to hold out."

It’s not only the injustices that will follow that are shameful. The political irresponsibility of Labour’s position is breathtaking."

I think most of Nick's comments are spot on. I don't claim to know whether it will be mainstream Conservatives, Reform UK, the Greens, or even the Lib/Dems who will gain most electorally from Starmer and Lammy's attempt to vandalise our civil liberties. 

But even if it's my own party that gains at the next election I don't want it to be at the price to Britain as a free country which these changes could create.