Scrapping trial by jury: Austerity’s attack on our rights

Paul Heron, Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers (personal capacity)

The proposal to scrap jury trials for all but the most serious cases would have, if passed, been a profound shift in the balance of power between the state and the working class. Even though Lord Chancellor David Lammy has stepped back a bit, attacks are still incoming on trial by jury – one of the few remaining democratic footholds in a justice system hollowed out by austerity and organised under the guidance of laws passed in the interests of the capitalist class. Removing it is not a technical fix to long court delays, but the latest authoritarian step to concentrate power even further in the hands of an unrepresentative judiciary, while sidelining ordinary people.

Politicians, particularly Labour politicians, repeat endlessly that the criminal courts face a ‘crisis’, and they do. The Crown Court backlog now exceeds 75,000 cases, trials are scheduled years into the future, while thousands of victims and defendants wait in uncertainty.

But this backlog was not caused by juries. For over a decade, the state deliberately ran down the resources of the justice system. Court buildings have closed or been left to decay; sitting days cut; staff underpaid and stretched to breaking point; legal aid gutted, and solicitors leaving criminal defence work in droves.

It is the work of the current and previous austerity governments. They have shrunk public services while extending coercive state power, like attacks on the right to protest and strike. The crisis now being invoked to justify scrapping juries is the direct result of those choices.

Now, instead of reversing cuts, restoring legal aid, or repairing court infrastructure, ministers point to juries as the obstacle to ‘efficiency.’ Sir Brian Leveson’s Review floated the idea of replacing juries with a judge and two magistrates in a wide range of cases. David Lammy, wanted to go even further, removing juries from most trials and abandoning the magistrate element altogether. But he has now endorsed Leveson’s proposals.

The significance of juries is material, not symbolic. Juries insert ordinary people directly into the machinery of the state and the justice system.

Juries have been a barrier to political prosecutions and a defence against systemic prejudice. The 2017 Lammy Review showed that magistrates disproportionately convict Black and minority ethnic defendants, while juries, more diverse, more representative, and forced to deliberate collectively, do not show the same bias. Removing juries shifts power back toward the very institutions that reproduce class and racial inequality.

A judiciary under strain and under pressure

Shifting fact-finding to judges will not reduce delays. No evidence supports that claim, and no pilot studies exist. Judges are already overloaded. The upper ranks of the judiciary remain overwhelmingly dominated by those who attended private schools or Oxbridge universities, according to the Sutton Trust. Extending democracy includes the call for the election of judges as well as other measures such as maintaining juries, restoring legal aid and improving the pay and conditions of workers across the justice system.

Why judge-only trials now?

Austerity has exacerbated a justice system in which delays are weaponised against working-class and minority defendants. Long waits push people to plead guilty; lack of representation leaves them exposed; and decaying courts devalue the right to a fair hearing.

Removing juries accelerates this dynamic. It allows the state to process cases more quickly and with less public scrutiny. It shifts justice towards a technocratic, bureaucratic model. This is authoritarian neoliberalism: shrinking welfare, expanding policing, and hollowing out democratic oversight.

Every attempt to restrict jury trials historically has been resisted. If we allow this change, it will not be temporary. It will be part of a long-term erosion of public involvement in the administration of justice by representatives of a capitalist class who face growing opposition and are preparing by increasing the powers of the state.

Jury trial remains one of the few institutions in which ordinary people collectively exercise influence over the state. To weaken it is to shift the balance towards an increasingly authoritarian model of justice built on the ruins of austerity.

The jury system has been described as the “the lamp that shows that freedom lives.” The real long-term threat to justice is not the backlog, it is the state’s attempt to extinguish that lamp in the name of ‘efficiency.’