David Lammy's deceptive diatribe

Keir Starmer and David Lammy are attempting to abolish the right to choose a trial by jury for all but the most extreme cases, and Lammy's defence of this strategy is absolutely diabolical

The Secretary of State for Justice David Lammy has posted an extraordinary diatribe on social media, defending his policy of abolishing the historic British right to trial by jury, for all but the most serious offences.

In the post he plays a facile game of "true or false" over his ideological attack on the jury system.

One of the most damning things is the way that he uses the word "offenders" to refer to unconvicted defendants. This blatantly contradicts the presumption of innocence which is absolutely fundamental to British law.

Maybe you’d expect the Justice Secretary to understand the foundational legal principle that defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, but apparently Lammy doesn’t.

Lammy then cites the hypothetical example of shoplifting a bottle of whisky to try to minimise the impact of his attack on the jury system.

This is a deeply deceptive attempt to downplay the scale of his intended reforms because nicking a bottle of whisky would almost certainly end up with a caution anyway, and go nowhere near a court (jury trial or not). It’s actually much more significant crimes that Lammy is seeking to abolish the right to jury trials for. Serious crimes that carry sentences of up to three years.

It’s also important to note his choice of wording: "If you’ve stolen a bottle of whisky, you should not get a jury trial".

It’s an obvious contradiction of the presumption of innocence again.

Lammy has things backwards. He seems to think that people who are accused of crimes are automatically guilty, and it’s a fault of the system that people who are accused of serious crimes, that carry sentences of up to three years, have a pesky right to request a trial by a jury of their peers.

Lammy’s facile game of "true or false" makes no mention of the fact that 90% of criminal cases never go to court, and even when they do, only about 20-25% of defendants plead not-guilty, necessitating lengthy trials.

So when he’s talking about the need to abolish the right to trial by jury for serious offences that carry sentences of up to three years, in order to deal with the backlog of criminal cases (caused by the Tory austerity assault on the legal system), he’s being deceptive.

If these reforms really were aimed at dealing with the backlog, they’d feature a sunset clause to restore the right to trial by jury once the backlog has been reduced, which they absolutely don’t.

The real way to reduce the court backlog is to reinvest in the austerity-wracked legal system, not to erase our rights. But Starmer, Reeves, and Lammy don’t want to do this because they’re as ideologically committed to austerity ruination as the Tories who did all the damage.

One of the most offensive things in Lammy’s diatribe is the part where he says that "in a hospital, if you scrape your knee, you are not seen by a consultant".

The idea that being accused of a crime that carries a sentence of up to three years in jail is comparable to a grazed knee is deeply deceptive.

Being found guilty and serving up to three years in jail is no trivial thing, The consequences are vastly more serious than a knee abrasion. You’d lose your job; probably your home; possibly your family. Your reputation would be destroyed, as would your future employment prospects.

The idea that the justice system works anything like medical triage is absolutely stupid. If you go to the hospital with knee abrasions, a broken arm, excruciating abdominal pain, or whatever, the system isn’t adversarial. You don’t have an appointed medical team saying that you do have a medical problem, while the hospital’s team attempt to argue that you’re perfectly healthy and lying about being ill, with the ultimate decision made by a consultant.

The comparison is ludicrous, and Lammy’s making it because he’s trying to obscure the fact that he wants to take the decision to convict away from juries, and give it to judges and magistrates.

62% of senior judges attended private school, as opposed to just 7% of the population, and magistrates are lay people with minimal legal qualifications.

Lammy is trying to take away defendant’s rights to be tried by randomly selected peers, and handing the decision over people’s fates to a bunch of state appointed toffs.

There’s an even bigger danger too, because these reforms are laying the groundwork for the politicisation of the legal system by future governments.

It’s not hard to imagine the diabolical consequences if an extremist government were to appoint a load of their lackeys as magistrates, to then misuse this Labour-gifted sentencing power to lock up political opponents for years.

One further point is that there was absolutely no mention of this plan to erase our historic right to a trial by jury in the 2024 Labour manifesto, so nobody voted for this.

It’s not just that Lammy is trying to erode our historic British rights to a fair trial by a jury of our peers, he’s being disgustingly deceptive about it.

From his obvious contempt for the presumption of innocence; through his citing of the trivial example of shoplifting to minimise the scale of the changes; to his absurd comparison of potentially facing years in jail to a scraped knee, it’s utterly appalling stuff.

If Keir Starmer was anything like the forensic lawyer his acolytes love to portray him as, he’d know how dangerous it is to remove our rights and leave people’s fates in the hands of a tiny minority of government appointed employees.

He’d also know how unacceptable it is for his Justice Secretary to contradict the presumption of innocence, and to be so outrageously deceptive about his plan to erase our historic right to a fair trial by a jury of our peers.

David Lammy should be fired, and this horrifying assault on our historic British right to trial by a jury should be thrown in the bin. But this won’t happen because Starmer seems to be just as keen as Lammy on the plan to destroy our rights, and the strategy of lying about it to downplay the seriousness of what they’re trying to do.