Abolishing Jury Trials Is a Direct Assault on English Liberty

Against the Quiet Undoing of a Thousand Years

“The jury system has come to stand for all we mean by English justice. The scrutiny of 12 honest jurors provides defendants and plaintiffs alike a safeguard from arbitrary perversion of the law.”

- Sir Winston Churchill, 1956

There are moments in the life of a nation when the danger ahead is not announced aloud, nor marked by sweeping constitutional drama, but creeps in quietly, wrapped in administrative language, justified by “efficiency,” and sold as a necessary response to crisis. The proposal now circulating in Whitehall, the plan to abolish jury trials for all but the gravest offences, belongs to this class of quiet undoings. It is a measure that would strike at the heart of English liberty, not by overturning the law, but by hollowing out the very institutions that have defined it for a millennium.

To truly appreciate the scale of what is at stake, one must recall that the common law of England is not merely a legal system: it is a civilizational inheritance. Centuries in the making, from the Assize of Clarendon to Magna Carta, the English fashioned a legal order that championed the very idea that law stands above power, and that “we the people”, not the state, sits in judgment of those accused.

Early Anglo-Saxon Dooms recognized property rights as written; courts were local, communal, and public; and wrongful detention could be challenged. Alfred the Great carried these traditions further still, articulating that the king was not master of the law but its steward, and harmonizing inherited customs like a jurist assembling a body of precedent. He and his successors strengthened the mechanisms of community judgment, oath-helpers, witnesses, local courts, that would, over centuries, ripen into the jury.

By the 12th century, the Assize of Clarendon introduced presentment juries, and with them the radical idea that ordinary people had not only the right to judge facts, but the duty to police the state’s accusations. When Magna Carta enshrined that no free man could be imprisoned “except by the lawful judgment of his peers,” it crystallized the animating belief of English liberty: no ruler, no official, no judge may deprive a person of freedom unless the community concurs. A jury is not a procedural formality; it is the last and most enduring check on the abuse of state power.

To sweep away this tradition because the courts are burdened, and the backlog large is to abandon the very idea that justice is more than administrative throughput. Backlogs are real, delays are painful, and victims deserve timely hearings. But a system that speeds convictions by eliminating juries is not modernizing justice, it is redefining it downward, converting a god given liberty into a bureaucratic convenience.

This wouldn’t be the first time that the guardians of “modernization” have attempted to redesign, and subsequently chip away at this constitutional architecture. In the 1960’s, Home Secretary Roy Jenkins abolished important distinctions between felony and misdemeanor, and introduced majority verdicts, a radical change that cut against centuries of precedent requiring jury unanimity. The Blair government, too, dismantled long-standing constitutional guardrails under the guise of modernization and constitutional reform.

The British government now suggests that only cases of murder, rape, and manslaughter warrant the presence of one’s peers. But everything in the history of English liberty contradicts this narrowing. The very premise of the jury is that power is restrained not only in extraordinary cases but in ordinary ones too. Tyranny thrives not in spectacular abuses but in the mundane, the procedural, and the unnoticed. When a judge sits alone, the state sits with him. When citizens sit in judgment, the state must persuade them.

Abolishing jury trials for most offences tears out a structural safeguard that no modern parliament invented, and no modern parliament has the moral authority to discard. It is the living descendant of a thousand years of constitutional wisdom, a chain linking Clarendon to Magna Carta to the present day.

In the long arc of English history, liberty has survived kings, invasions, revolutions, and wars precisely because it was never left solely in the hands of officials. It was anchored in the community, in the presumption that ordinary people, gathered in a jury box, embody a deeper and more enduring justice than any state-appointed authority.

Now to abandon that inheritance would be a betrayal not only of the past but of the future. Nations rarely lose their freedoms in a single moment. They lose them through a series of small concessions, each justified by necessity, each defended as temporary, until one day, the old rights are remembered only as customs of a freer age.

It is a path down which Britain should not take even one step. The liberty of a people is not measured by the efficiency of its courts but by the institutions that restrain them. A nation which entrusts justice solely to judges is a nation which has forgotten how it became free.

Now, when the temptation to streamline justice is greatest, the duty to defend its ancient foundations is greatest still. The jury box may be humble, but it stands taller than any minister, for it carries the weight of a thousand years. And if the government wishes to preserve not merely order but liberty, it must leave that box, and the people within it untouched.

Having opened with a quote by Sir Winston Churchill, I will close with a quote from the current Justice Secretary, who is the chief advocate of this devastating proposal:

“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 buildings across the country to make sure these [trials] can happen in a way that is safe… you don’t fix the backlog with trials that are widely perceived as unfair.”

- David Lammy, 2020