The Government’s plan to scrap jury trials for all but the most serious offences is not a mere bureaucratic tweak. It is a brazen assault on a foundational democratic right dressed up in the threadbare language of ‘efficiency’. For the working class, the jury is not just a legal institution; it is a fragile but crucial check on state and corporate power. Its proposed dismantling exposes the ruling class’s fear of popular judgment and its drive to streamline repression.
The pretext, as ever, is cost and speed. Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary, Alex Chalk, cites court backlogs, arguing that dispensing with juries for mid-level offences like theft, burglary, and assault will deliver ‘swift justice’. But justice for whom?
The backlog is a crisis of their own making; a decade of brutal austerity that hollowed out the courts, closed hundreds of them, and decimated legal aid. They created the logjam – and now offer to curtail our democratic rights as the solution.
It is a capitalist classic: defund a public good, declare it broken, and replace it with a cheaper, more controlled, private model. In this case, the ‘cheaper model’ is justice dispensed solely by state-appointed judges, removing the inconvenient buffer of the public conscience.
For centuries the jury has stood on the principle that we should be tried by a panel of our peers. This is not a sentimental tradition. It is a critical democratic right. A jury can consider the spirit of the law, not just its letter.
It can bring the values of the community to bear and has the power to deliver a verdict based on conscience – a principle known as ‘jury nullification’. Historically, this has been a tool to resist repressive laws, from prosecutions for trade union activity to unjust sanctions against protesters.
A judge, a career professional embedded within the state apparatus, is far less likely to question the system they serve. Removing juries eliminates this element of popular sovereignty and tilts the scales decisively towards the prosecution, which already commands vast resources.
The class character of this move is unmistakable. While petty criminals, who themselves may be forced into crime by poverty, are denied jury trials, complex financial crimes, corporate negligence, and state misconduct that devastate thousands of lives, remain untouched, often escaping prosecution entirely.
This is about creating a two-tier justice system: a streamlined, conveyor-belt process for the crimes of poverty and desperation, and the full panoply of rights for the powerful. It is the legal expression of a society that criminalises the symptoms of its own failures.
The jury is one of the few state institutions where ordinary people exercise some kind of power. It is a brief, potent experience of collective deliberation and decision-making outside the control of managers, bureaucrats, or politicians.
The ruling class has a deep-seated distrust of such popular power. They prefer systems managed by ‘experts’ and elites. Eliminating juries for a vast swathe of cases disenfranchises us from the justice process, making it a closed loop between police, prosecutors, and judges.
As the mass organisations of the working class, trade unions must rally against this attack on our democratic rights. Every worker is a potential defendant. The right to a fair trial, including a jury, is a cornerstone of the liberties that allow us to organise, strike, and protest. A government willing to strip this right for a shoplifting case today will eye its removal for ‘public order’ offences related to industrial action tomorrow.
We must demand:
- Reverse the cuts to the justice system: reopen courts, restore legal aid, hire more staff.
- Extend the right to trial by jury: Use juries for inquests and inquiries into corporate and state wrongdoing.
- A workers’ education campaign: Teach the history of the jury and its role as a check on oppression.
But even with the best jury system in the world, British courts would remain class-based justice, where unelected judges, almost all picked from the upper classes, preside over cases, guide and misguide juries, and hand down their own sentences.
We fight for workers’ courts, which would not ignore the class system and inherent injustice of capitalism, but take that fact as their starting point. Ultimately, to establish such a justice system, we will have to smash the capitalist state, of which the courts are an integral part.
