This article is taken from the February 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Sir Keir Starmer is one of those rare politicians who has the reverse Midas touch. The idea of mandatory digital IDs was wildly popular, until he came out in favour of them.
The Labour Party, which ran Wales as near as a one-party state, may lose power in the upcoming Senedd elections. The list gets longer by the minute.
Perhaps that is the only silver lining associated with his plans to scrap jury trials in England and Wales for all but the most serious of crimes. The jury has always had its critics, who over the past century have successfully killed the grand jury, most coroner juries and virtually all civil juries. Even in criminal law, the scope of juries has been considerably restricted from that which a Victorian would recognise.
Yet the fact that Starmer has pledged to scrap most uses of criminal juries may save them for the next generation. The government has fumbled, as is its wont, its case for abolition, made so much harder by the fact that the current Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain praised them as recently as 2017 as “a success story of our justice system” in a review that bears his distinguished name.
Now David Lammy argues that his Christian faith drives his quest to get rid of juries, a claim as grotesque as it is ridiculous. The reason why the government wants to abolish juries, as absolutely everyone knows, is money.
It cannot fund the courts system properly, so there are large criminal backlogs, so courtrooms sit empty because the Ministry of Justice will not allow them to sit on some days, so it is seeking shortcuts to reduce the backlogs, so that the slow, cumbersome, demotic jury has to go.
If the government explained the problem in such terms, there is a chance that the penny-pinching taxpayer might have allowed it to pass. Instead, invocations of the Bible have been mixed with barely-veiled accusations that anyone against scrapping juries is on the side of evil criminals.
This convinces no one, particularly as there is a high correlation between romanticising about the juries and the common law of Englishmen on the one hand, and favouring draconian retributive justice on the other.
Quite why Lammy had to go to Toronto to witness a juryless trial is a mystery
In desperation to give his position some respectability and heft, Lammy went to Canada to praise its mostly-juryless criminal justice system (like Lammy’s mooted reforms, Canada reserves jury trials for serious crimes only).
Quite why he had to go to Toronto instead of his local magistrates’ court to witness a juryless trial is a mystery, but Lammy got a video out of his excursion, so it was clearly worth it.
Notably absent from Lammy’s praise for the Canadian system is an acknowledgement that backlogs have fallen in Canada not because most trials are judge-only (this has been the case for many years), but because the Supreme Court of Canada arbitrarily decided that any criminal charge not tried after either 18 or 30 months, depending on the case, is automatically dismissed.
Since 2016, when R. v. Jordan was decided, hundreds of accused murderers, rapists and assorted alleged miscreants have been beneficiaries of the Supreme Court of Canada’s liberality, something which Lammy no doubt wanted to avoid highlighting.
Whilst I still have the reader’s attention, allow me to highlight another nefarious aspect of Labour’s criminal justice destruction proposals.
Currently, a person convicted in the magistrates’ court has an automatic right of having his case heard ab novo — from the beginning — in the crown court. Given the quality of the lay justice dispensed in the magistrates’ courts, this is a reasonable safeguard.
The government proposes to abolish the automatic right to appeal against conviction; instead it wishes to require leave from a judge before an appeal to the crown court is allowed.
Initially Lammy told Parliament that appeals will be limited to points of law, but the government subsequently reversed course, presumably after someone sat down and realised the profound stupidity of limiting appeals from verdicts handed down by JPs whose main skill in life is to be able to tolerate an online assessment centre.
This is not to say that most magistrates are anything but conscientious members of the community who wish to render the state some service. But every lawyer has horror stories of the basic justice administered by bad eggs (busybodies, low-tier status chasers, the stupid), and unlike juries there is no professional judicial guidance on points of law.
Unlike the abolition of juries, Lammy cannot fly to Canada and make a video about the virtues of depriving defendants of their crucial right to appeal at the crown court.
