Civic Responsibility

Alaa Abd El-Fattah should never have been given British citizenship. But he was. That, the subsequent extension of consular support to him in the country of his other nationality, and the priority given by successive governments to his release, all suggest that he is a British intelligence asset. In fact, they do not suggest that. They state it.

Citizenship should be irrevocable, or it is meaningless. Yet without having to give a reason, the Home Secretary can now revoke the British citizenship of anyone whom she thought ought to be eligible for another nationality, whether or not they were. Bangladesh has consistently and understandably refused to have anything to do with the London-born Shamima Begum, for whose repatriation to the United Kingdom Nigel Farage and Zia Yusuf have called, as David Davis, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Peter Hitchens still do.

What sort of permanent member of the United Nations Security Council claims that its national security is threatened by Begum? Nothing about her story surprises me, yet it still has the power to shock. Undoubtedly with the full cooperation of its British counterparts, Canadian intelligence was trafficking British girls to Syria to join the side that we were aiding and abetting there while bombing it across the Sykes-Picot Line in Iraq, where our intervention had created it in the first place. The 15-year-old Begum was married almost immediately upon her arrival in that country, and pregnant almost immediately after that. "She wanted it" is not an argument that would normally be admitted under such circumstances.

Begum ought to be tried by a jury that, unless it were unanimously convinced beyond reasonable doubt of her guilt, ought to deliver a verdict of not guilty, which should be an enduring verdict, affording lifelong protection from double jeopardy. In the event of such a conviction, then like a 15-year-old runner for county lines, she would not be blameless, but like a 15-year-old runner for county lines, she would not be the most to blame.

Keep saying it until in quite sinks in. Even while bombing the IS that it had created in Iraq, NATO was so committed to the victory of IS in Syria, as has now come to pass, that via the NATO member state of Turkey, it trafficked British schoolgirls to Syria to hand over to IS. In at least one case, a 15-year-old was pregnant almost immediately, having been married so soon after her arrival that the arrangements had clearly been made in advance. Her British citizenship has since been revoked at a stroke of the Home Secretary's pen, not because she held another nationality, nor even because she would have been eligible for one, but merely because the then Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, thought that she ought to have been. When the Supreme Court upheld that decision, then that judgment was welcomed by Javid's successor, Priti Patel, whom Theresa May had sacked as International Development Secretary because she had diverted funds via Israel to an Islamic State field hospital in the the Golan Heights, and who two months later granted British citizenship to El-Fattah.

If you are one of the huge proportion of the population of Great Britain with an ancestral connection to Ireland, or if you are almost any of the current inhabitants of Northern Ireland including all of the MPs sitting in any of four Unionist interests, then your British citizenship could now be revoked at a stroke of the Home Secretary's pen. 50 per cent of people in Britain with an Afro-Caribbean parent also have a white parent. If you are in that position, even if your other ancestors have been Anglo-Saxon for as long as there have been any Anglo-Saxons, or even if Julius Caesar heard them speaking the language that was now Welsh, then your British citizenship could now be revoked at a stroke of the Home Secretary's pen.

And if you would qualify under Israel's Law of Return, which is considerably looser than the Rabbinical definition of who is Jewish, then your British citizenship could now be revoked at a stroke of the Home Secretary's pen. How's that for anti-Semitism?

Trams Before Trans

For the workers, not the woke. Well, for the workers, as such, before the woke, as such. “For the many, not the few” is not universality.

The Leeds trams are costing £2.5 billion, so far, to arrive no earlier than the late 2030s. This is the country of your ever-increasing utility bills, of the HS2 that must have diamond-encrusted platinum tracks, of PPE, of the money paid to Rwanda to take four volunteers (having always said that it would take only 100 people per year), and of the top secret £1,593,535,200 to rent the Bibby Stockholm for two years. And there is more. So very, very, very much more. Never, ever, ever let it be said that there was no money. Someone is getting paid, and it is not us.

Instead, let us build an all-of-the-above transport policy around public transport free at the point of use, including publicly owned railways running on the electricity that public ownership would also supply to charging points in every neighbourhood and village. Astonishingly, and yet not, the fewest charging points for electric vehicles are in the coalfield areas. Also, never forget that buses carry far more passengers than trains do, but those passengers tend not to be politicians or the “opinion-forming” sort of journalists; Jeremy Corbyn was mercilessly derided for having so much as mentioned buses. And so on. Let a thousand flowers bloom. In a well-tended, well-watered garden.

Harnessing the power of the State to deliver an all-of-the-above transport policy is one of the many reasons to want to harness that power to deliver an all-of-the-above energy policy, not least in view of the fact that British operators had just struck oil in the Norwegian North Sea close to the border with the British waters under which new exploration had been banned. Around the twin poles of the civil nuclear power that Britain pioneered and of the clean coal technology in which massively coal-rich Britain was the world leader until the defeat of the miners, let there be oil, gas, lithium, wind, solar, tidal, and everything else, bathing this country in heat and light. This is why we have a State.

That is what we ought to be doing, rather than tagging along with an American invasion of Venezuela on stated grounds that were not even supposed to be taken seriously when everyone knew that the real reason was to take control of the largest proven oil reserves in the world and of vast reserves of gas. And this is what we ought to be doing, rather than tagging along with an American  invasion of oil-rich and gas-rich Nigeria. With all my heart, I wish that I could believe that Donald Trump were going to liberate the Nigerian Christians. But local Christian communities have always suffered desperately during and after these interventions, and the interveners have never given a damn.

The same would happen, and may already be beginning to happen, when clodhopping “Crusaders” decided to “take back” areas of Britain with largely Muslim populations. They hate the King with a fervour that I have never encountered, whether directed at him or at his late mother, from even the most ardent republican on the Left. I have always said that the eventual threat to the monarchy would come from the Right, but I had assumed that that would be because it was so obviously incompatible with Thatcherite meritocracy. Yet here we are.

And yet these would-be overthrowers of the Throne also see themselves as the guardians of “the traditional rural way of life”. Not only that, but they would be barking up the wrong tree even if they still wanted the King at the top of it. For example, 30 per cent or more of lamb and mutton bought in this country is halal. The South Asian Muslim diet, at least, is decidedly meaty. As is at least the Ashkenazi Strictly Orthodox diet, which is a much smaller market but a rapidly growing one.

Virtually all sheep in Britain end up in the human food chain, and disproportionately on the plates of those who kept kosher or halal. Yet the experimental puberty blockers that are to be given to children as young as 10 or even eight have already been banned in sheep, which they gave impaired memory, altered behaviour, enlarged amygdala, and lasting brain damage even once the treatment had stopped. What happened to those sheep? There was already a natural alliance between the opponents of puberty blockers and those who adhered to kosher or halal. It may have found its immediate basis.

Those who have been formed by gender criticism have also been shaken by the realisation that there was no law against sex-selective abortion. Since the legalisation of abortion itself, there never has been. Yet the Scotland of the post-Sturgeon SNP is moving to legalise sex-selective abortion explicitly. Whatever happened to gender self-identification? Was sex not “assigned at birth”? On what pro-choice grounds could anyone object to this particular choice? If half of unborn children were male, in the old-fashioned sense of having Y chromosomes, then how could they be part of a woman’s body? And in that case, then how could the other half be part of that body, either?

Yet never in British history has there been a prosecution for sex-selective abortion. In 2013, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, declined to bring charges against two doctors who had been caught on camera agreeing to arrange abortions of girls because of their sex. He wrote to the Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, that,  “The law does not, in terms, expressly prohibit gender-specific abortions; rather it prohibits any abortion carried out without two medical practitioners having formed a view, in good faith, that the health risks of continuing with a pregnancy outweigh those of termination.” Starmer had concluded that there would be no public interest in a prosecution. That has been the conclusion in every such case.

The law forbids the inhumane killing of third trimester vertebrate fetuses of any species except our own. Yes, really. Margaret Thatcher abolished the time limit on abortion where there was “a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped”, of which the risk did not need to be quantified, nor the abnormalities specified. Even before that fig leaf was discarded, this country already had 48 abortions for every 100 live births. That was not because Muslims did not want daughters. Muslims are not keen on abortion, and there are far too few of them to produce those numbers. China is less than two per cent Muslim, and there are only 200,000 Muslims, mostly foreign workers, among the 51.75 million inhabitants of South Korea. Taiwan is less than one per cent Muslim, as is Vietnam.

The Muslim 14 per cent of the population of India accounts for only 6.6 per cent of sex-selective abortions in the country that accounts for 50 per cent of the world’s missing female births. Like the husband who murdered her, Anu Bansal was a Hindu, as are 86.7 per cent of those who procure female foeticide, although Hindus are only 80 per cent of the population. The figures for Sikhs are 4.9 and 1.7. The practice is increasingly evident among the richer residents of the urban areas of Nepal, which is proportionally the most Hindu country in the world.

Muhammad condemned the female infanticide that was prevalent in pre-Islamic Arabia, and while there is a certain culture of it in urban Pakistan, British Pakistanis mostly descend from the God-fearing countryside, with even New Mirpur City only the seventy-fourth most populous. There is no such culture in Bangladesh. Shockat Adam, Adnan Hussain, Iqbal Mohamed and Ayoub Khan would undoubtedly vote for a Bill or an amendment to ban sex-selective abortion.

Puberty blockers and sex-selective abortion are among the fruits of the classification of femaleness as in itself a medicable condition by means of the Pill, which is simply not a medicine at all. It is, in point of fact, a poison, designed precisely to stop healthy body parts from performing their natural functions, and accordingly attended by all manner of horrific side effects, for no reason except to make women permanently available for the sexual gratification of men, and despite the unrivalled effectiveness of Natural Family Planning if it is taught and practised properly, a practice only possible by a faithful married couple. Puberty blockers are also just such a poison, and there is now argument against them that is not an argument against the Pill, or vice versa. Moreover, the Pill has wrought yet further havoc by filling our water supply with synthetic oestrogens. Like puberty blockers in mutton, in lamb, and in ewe’s milk products, but as yet on a vastly larger scale, this is both a social justice and an environmental concern.

Instead, let us celebrate the full compatibility between the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past. That means growth, industry, what someone once nearly called “the white heat of technology”, and the equitable distribution of their fruits among and within the nations of the world, for everyone to enjoy at least the standard of living that we ourselves already enjoyed. Including in the form of trams.

Behind The Times

Some weirdo is bombarding me with emails while pretending to be Oliver Kamm.

But he or she still calls Times writers "my colleagues".

Is There No Help For The Widow's Son?

The Metropolitan Police "will robustly defend our decision to require officers and staff to declare if they are Freemasons", and there has just been the annual outpouring of anger at the non-enforcement of the hunting ban. The Masonic Lodges were key to the circulation of the ideas that became the French Revolution against which all three of Gaullism, the non-Gaullist French Right and the non-Marxist French Left are to many extents ongoing reactions. In the Latin world, those Lodges have ever since been organisational bases of attacks on the Church and on Her interests. They were also key to the circulation of the ideas against which the several States had to demand that the First Amendment protect their respective Established Churches.

Freemasonry has been, and to some extent remains, part of petty anti-Catholicism in this country; it was, for example, why Catholics found it so difficult to secure promotion while working for the Consett Iron Company. But it is impossible to imagine a band of men less likely to conspire to overthrow the economic, social, cultural and political order. Simply because it is impossible to imagine a band of men that better epitomised the economic, social, cultural and political order. Masonic influence over the Church in this country, and Catholic influence over the Masons, are both immemorial in certain places. I knew of a ward where the only way to get anything done was through the Catholics within the Masons within the Labour Party.

That was not a post-Conciliar phenomenon: it had ever been thus, and several of the individuals in question were Latin Mass aficionados, while they were all indefatigable battlers for Catholic schools, pro-life, and so on. All aspects of which I was told were fairly unusual but far from unique, whether then, or in the 1950s, or ever. A lot of people were surprised when one was surprised at them. Cardinal Heenan was known expressly to enjoin converts, including convert Anglican clergymen, to remain active in the Lodge. Scotland is a different story, but I should not be at all surprised if Catholics were now the single largest bloc among English Freemasons, and had been for decades. In fact, I should be thoroughly surprised if that were not the case.

To them was and is addressed the message, formulated while he was still an Anglican clergyman, of Fr Walton Hannah, who had no time for lurid Masonic conspiracy theories. It was precisely because the original Masonic rituals in this country had drawn heavily on the Book of Common Prayer, itself drawn heavily from Medieval and earlier sources, but had later been redacted to exclude expressions of orthodox Trinitarian and Christological doctrine, that they were now unconscionable to those who continued to adhere to that orthodoxy. That argument is unanswerable. On these shores, we ought therefore to deploy that, and not detain ourselves with Abroad's lurid theories, or even lurid facts, for which Fr Hannah had no time.

Turning Points

Oh, for pity's sake, Alaa Abd El-Fattah is obviously a British intelligence asset, given British citizenship by Priti Patel while Robert Jenrick was Immigration Minister, via a route that had had a good character test until Caroline Noakes had taken it away. At the time, Liz Truss was Foreign Secretary, taking up El-Fattah's case whenever she met Egyptian officials, and James Cleverly was Minister of State for the Middle East, North Africa and North America. Cleverly later became Foreign Secretary, when he, too, fought hard for El-Fattah. As Prime Minister, so did Rishi Sunak, and so did Boris Johnson, whose circle is merrily taking over Reform UK, to the delight of Nigel Farage.

Not only is it obvious, but it is not even unusual. For example, successive British Governments transformed Manchester into the world centre of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group that went on to bomb Manchester Arena. Britain invaded Libya in order to install such people as its new regime. From the ensuing civil war, the Royal Navy rescued both Salman Abedi, who went on to carry out that bombing, killing himself in the process, and his brother Hashem, who went on to be a key figure in the planning of that bombing, and who in April of this year threw hot cooking oil over, and stabbed with makeshift knives, three Prison Officers at HMP Frankland, members of our community here in County Durham. And then there was Libya and the then Prince Andrew. The lawyers made Andrew Lownie take most of that out. But Tarek Kaituni. Remember that name. Tarek Kaituni.

Having cultivated the Abedis and El-Fattah, MI5 and MI6 have just been granted new powers to spy on Members of Parliament without the permission of the Prime Minister. All right, they have always done that. But even the formal propriety has been removed. El-Fattah was already 40 years old when he was given British citizenship without ever having lived in the United Kingdom and despite already holding another nationality, that of the country where he resided. No nationality other than British has ever been held by the London-born Shamima Begum. Undoubtedly with the full cooperation of its British counterparts, Canadian intelligence was trafficking British girls to Syria to join the side that we were aiding and abetting there while bombing it across the Sykes-Picot Line in Iraq, where our intervention had created it in the first place. The 15-year-old Begum was married almost immediately upon her arrival in that country, and pregnant almost immediately after that. Having won, that side has bombed the Iowa National Guard, so the Americans are having to retaliate against that latest indication that no one important had read Frankenstein.

In that vein, El-Fattah would be comparable to Lucy Connolly only when anyone had acted on his exhortations, as they had in fact committed the arson with intent to endanger life that Connolly had incited. Likewise, Luke Yarwood tweeted, "Violence and murder is the only way now. Start off burning every migrant hotel then head off to MP houses in Parliament. We need to take over by FORCE." Stage Two of that was never attempted, but Stage One was. Only when anyone had tried to give effect to El-Fattah's effusions would he be on par with Yarwood. Ricky Jones was found not guilty by a jury.

As Pascal Robinson-Foster (Bobby Vylan) would have been. Two out of 12 randomly assembled members of the general public? Easy. So no, it did not meet the threshold for a public prosecution. The Campaign Against Antisemitism is muttering about a private prosecution, but the District Judge who quashed its attempt to summons Reginald D. Hunter has ordered that his exceptionally forthright judgment be attached to any such future application by the CAA, with which the Charity Commision needs to deal as a matter of urgency. People have been arrested for having chanted "Globalise the Intifada" or "From the River to the Sea", but has any of them been charged? Now that the CAA has been discredited, if the Palestine Action defendants were acquitted, then where would this lawfare cottage industry be? Over to those two out of 12 randomly assembled members of the general public.

After Somali immigrants in Minnesota had been demonised, all the way up or down to an attempt to remove Ilhan Omar from Congress, Israel has become the only member of the United Nations to recognise the one-clan enclave that called itself by the name of the much larger Somaliland, right by the Bab-el-Mandeb, and no less conveniently positioned for the deportation of the Palestinians. But the plan is not coming together so well in Britain, where Rupert Lowe has spotted a gap in the market. He does not treat "What about kosher slaughter?" as a showstopping rhetorical question. Instead, he confirms that he would ban that, which never involves pre-stunning, along with halal slaughter, which in Britain usually does. Yet the same Telegraph in which a non-Christian said that the King was a better Christian than the Pope because the King had not mentioned Gaza in his Christmas Address, now says that non-stun slaughter must not be banned because it would affect Jews and not only Muslims. Why does Toryland still buy the Telegraph? Then again, it barely does anymore.

Lowe, on the other hand, understands the trend that was manifest at Turning Point USA's recent AmericaFest, when platform speaker after platform speaker was floored from the floor as the rising generation demanded answers about Israeli influence in American politics, about anti-Christianity in the Talmud, about violence against Christians on the part of West Bank settlers and the IDF, and about the USS Liberty. In September, there were Israeli flags all over the Unite the Kingdom rally. But by December, a recent Reform activist had to be removed from one of Ben Habib's meetings of Advance UK because she had segued from a well-received attack on Islam to an unwelcome criticism, both of Israeli influence in British politics, and, it must be said, of the Talmud, all while quoting Charlie Kirk. In scores of seats, the difference between a Reform gain and not will come down to a tiny number of votes, but the Right is looking as fractious as the Left.

One Day In Britain’s Broken Justice System

Lucy Bannerman writes:

It is a midweek morning at Snaresbrook crown court, east London, and already there is fury and farce in court 9. The fury belongs to Judge Sandy Canavan; the farce comes courtesy of what should have been a straightforward sentencing hearing.

In the dock, William Pack, a slight, nervy 59-year-old man, is awaiting sentencing for having caused actual bodily harm to Misbah Sadique, 38, who was “run over by both wheels” of Pack’s car as he drove to the supermarket in Walthamstow in February last year.

But an important document — the victim impact statement, explaining how Sadique’s life was affected by the injuries she sustained — has only just materialised minutes before the sentencing, throwing a spanner in the works of a case that should have been completed by lunchtime.

The judge has spent months asking for this statement in repeated hearings so that the defence has a fair chance to respond. This time, she lets rip.

“The very thing I’ve tried to avoid has happened. Either I ignore the victim’s impact statement, or I adjourn, meaning the victim, Mr Pack and everybody else is inconvenienced. Ms Sadique will have to come back to court again to see what will happen to the man who ran her over.”

The following day, figures will reveal that the backlog of cases clogging up the crown courts is at a record high of almost 80,000.

However, the kind of basic inefficiency highlighted by Judge Canavan is only one of the reasons the British justice system is breaking.

It is a story of absence: not only of the documents that should have been shared, but have not; but also of the people who should be in court, but are not; the defendants who are absent because the prison van is delayed; the prosecutor who has not turned up; the empty seat where an interpreter should be.

Above all, it is the story of the courts that should be sitting but are not. Instead of justice being served, the lights are off and the doors are closed, leaving the accused, the aggrieved and everyone else to join the back of a lengthening queue.

Back in court 9, it is basic admin that is holding back Judge Canavan. “This is why the backlog cannot be dealt with,” she says. “I have set aside two and a half hours to deal with this sentencing this morning. Those two and a half hours are now wasted. Other cases I could have dealt with, I have not been able to put them on my list, because [the statement] I’ve been asking for since August has only been uploaded this morning. That’s a disgrace and the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] should be ashamed of itself.”

(In response, the CPS said it made “significant efforts” to obtain the statement. Police say they had “difficulties” contacting Sadique.)

After much administrative bashing together of diaries, another date is found next year to do what everyone in the courtroom had all gathered to do that morning.

The judge announces a new and “final” date for the sentencing hearing — “I will not move it” — only to move it thirty seconds later when it emerges the defence barrister will not be available because he will be tied up on another case. (With one in three criminal barristers thinking of quitting the crown courts, for less stressful, better paid work elsewhere, they too complain of being overstretched.) Pack’s next hearing is scheduled for February, two years, almost to the day, since the offence.

“More waiting,” weeps his elderly mother, hanky in one hand, walking stick in the other. “It has been two years! It’s ridiculous.”

Two years sits at the lesser end of the scale. In March, another judge at Snaresbrook made headlines when he apologised to a defendant accused of threatening people with a machete because his three-day trial could not be scheduled until October 2028. Other courts, such as Isleworth, in west London, are fixing trials as far into the future as 2030.

Judge Canavan asks an usher to “offer the court’s apologies” to the victim who is waiting outside, but make clear it’s not the court’s fault, or the defence’s fault, but the fault of the CPS and police”.

“Well,” she sighs, another morning wasted. “There’s nothing I can do.” She adjourns the court, with the disdain usually reserved for a puppy that has urinated on a new carpet: “Please don’t keep me company. All of you can go.”

Over in court 11, Brenna Wilson, an alleged shoplifter accused of actual bodily harm, has failed to turn up to court for the third time. She is accused of a series of violent offences, including biting a security guard in a north London branch of Marks & Spencer and threatening to infect him with HIV. The police officer has not turned up either. “This lady needs to be arrested,” said Judge Charles Falk, unable to take any further action. “[She] must not be left at large.”

In court 5, Judge Oscar Del Fabbro appears frustrated by the lack of progress in the case of a young Turkish man accused of sexual assault. In the first hearing, the defence counsel failed to appear. In the second, the interpreter has not turned up.

“We’re no further forward today in making progress,” he sighs. “I know things are tough out there, but this is not a good example of expedition.”

At least these courts are sitting. In other courts around the building, there is a much bigger problem, and the clue is in how eerily quiet it is. Snaresbrook is the largest crown court in the UK. Its 20 courts should be dealing with the vast range of cases, from shoplifting to terrorism, arising from an area of Greater London with a population of 4.3 million.

In the face of this gargantuan backlog, you might imagine it would feel like an overcrowded airport after a series of flight cancellations, with lots of staff working round the clock to push delayed passengers through the bottleneck and out to the other side. It does not. On one day, five of the 20 courts were sitting empty because there is not the budget to keep them open. What should be the busiest crown court in the country is being forced to run at reduced capacity.

There are enough crown courts across England and Wales to sit for 113,000 days each year. However, the “sitting days” were artificially capped at 105,000 in September last year to balance the Ministry of Justice budget. Judges will be allowed to sit for more days next year — 111,250 — but still short of the maximum capacity.

Baroness Carr of Walton-on-the-Hill, the head of the judiciary, has warned that these closures will end up costing more in the long run when cases are delayed, “because inflation will mean that everything costs more and because barristers and the CPS will have to redo the work they had done to be ready for trial, because the case will be stale”.

Ironically, on the same day Judge Canavan was venting about inefficiency, the whole of Snaresbrook crown court shut for the afternoon. Fifteen courts sat for the morning only. “Staff Christmas lunch”, according to sources.

The building itself, formerly a Victorian orphanage, may look neglected, but does not appear to be suffering dilapidation on quite the same scale that has bedevilled other court buildings around the country, such as the maggots raining down from rotting seagulls in the roof insulation of South Tyneside magistrates’ court, or the leaking roof at Inner London crown court, or the rat infestation at Manchester magistrates’ court.

Still, safe drinking water appears to be a luxury too far. The lawyers’ canteen upstairs has been mothballed. When the upset victim in a stalking case tried to get refreshments in the afternoon, after discovering her stalker would be spared jail, and would pay her compensation of only £500, she found none. The café was only open in the morning. “There’s not even a vending machine,” complained her daughter.

On another occasion, staff advised against drinking anything from the network of old water pipes. “I would not touch that water,” said one. “We don’t trust anything that comes out of those taps.”

Reacting to the record backlog this week, David Lammy, the justice secretary, said: “The scale of this crisis means tinkering at the edges is not enough. We simply cannot spend our way out of this mess — only fundamental reform can give the brave survivors of crime fairer and faster justice.”

Lammy believes that replacing many jury trials with judge-only trials will speed things up. The Criminal Bar Association, representing barristers, dismissed the policy as “dramatic gestures that pose as solutions”.

Riel Karmy-Jones KC, its chair, said: “We don’t need gimmicks. We need courtrooms that function.”

Lammy’s opponents may also point to the fact that, of the many things causing paralysis in dozens of cases at Snaresbrook this month, none of them were juries.

The Slow Normalisation of Militarisation

The idea that a year spent outside formal education is a “gap” is objectionable in itself, as was the Today programme’s treatment of Richard Dannatt as a respectable interviewee. And we all know that Keir Starmer’s son will not be doing that of which the combat veteran Paul Knaggs writes:

A Gap Year in Uniform

“Militarised Keynesianism isn’t an industrial strategy, it’s a business model that requires permanent WAR to stay profitable…”

The government has announced a new “gap year” scheme offering young people a short, paid taste of life in the Army, Navy or RAF. It’s being sold as an opportunity. In reality, it reads more like a sticking plaster over a much deeper wound.

Let’s be honest about what’s going on.

We’re told 150 young people will be recruited in the first year, with vague promises of growth later. No clear pay. No clear career pathway. No clarity on what they’ll actually be doing beyond basic training and “teamwork”. Even senior military figures admit it will make only marginal difference to the UK’s actual defence capacity.

This is not a bold new vision for defence, nor a revival of national purpose. It is an unguarded confession that the armed forces are hollowed out, struggling to recruit, struggling to retain, and paying the price for decades of cuts, overstretch, and a political class that treats service personnel as expendable line items. Rebranding this failure as “opportunity”, wrapping it in talk of skills, training and character-building, does not change the underlying reality. It merely disguises decline as aspiration.

This is FEAR.INC at work. The slow manufacture of consent, the steady drip-feed of threat and urgency, until the public is nudged towards accepting Military Keynesianism as inevitability rather than choice. A permanent state of readiness for a phoney war, where anxiety replaces strategy and spending replaces thinking. The story must keep moving, the enemy must remain fixed, and doubt must be disciplined out of the public mind.

Then Orwell lands like a gavel.

was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control.

Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.

– George Orwell, 1984

And yet the language is telling. A “whole-of-society approach”. A “new era” of defence. Preventing confrontation with Russia.

What this really looks like is the slow normalisation of militarisation, nudging working-class young people towards uniformed service while the same government offers them shrinking prospects elsewhere. No serious industrial strategy. No secure jobs. No housing. No future. Just discipline, resilience, and problem-solving skills “for life”.

It’s also worth noting what this scheme doesn’t do. It doesn’t fix pay and conditions for existing troops. It doesn’t address why people are leaving in droves. It doesn’t restore hollowed-out regiments or capacity. And it certainly doesn’t amount to a “national defence strategy”. As ever, the burden is placed on the young, while political leaders talk tough from behind press releases. Labour Heartlands has always supported those who serve. Many of us come from military families. We know the value of discipline, comradeship, and public service.

But we also know when service is being used as a substitute for a proper social contract. If the government wants young people to believe in the future of this country, it should start by giving them one worth believing in. Skills without security aren’t opportunity. Uniforms without strategy aren’t defence. And spin won’t fill the ranks where trust has been broken.

Manufacturing Fear to Fund a War Economy

“You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.”

– Albert Einstein

Of course, this is all part of the bigger picture. You can hear the drumbeat if you listen closely. It’s getting louder, faster, more insistent. The establishment and their media stenographers are busy building consensus, turning the volume up on fear, and preparing the ground. Preparing it for the only answer they ever seem to offer: more of your public money flowing into the industrial arms complex.

Again, this doesn’t happen in one dramatic announcement. It’s done through a steady drip, drip of anxiety. The threat is always “at the gates”. Not here yet, but close enough to demand urgency. Close enough to shut down doubt. Fear becomes the background hum of everyday life, until militarisation feels normal and questioning it feels irresponsible.

That’s how war economies survive. Not through necessity, but through manufactured consent. This isn’t a gap year. It’s just another gap in Labour’s vision.

Meet Again?

Games of cops and robbers sometimes descend into real violence, and that needs to be dealt with. The provisions already exist, and the primary responsibility rests with the parents. Likewise, trail hunts sometimes end up with the killing of a fox or other quarry by the hounds, and that needs to be dealt with. The provisions already exist, and the primary responsibility rests with the owners.

This is not about hunting as such. Farmers are a wily lot who will find a way, as they did last time. Then, Tony Blair used the hunting ban to buy support for the Iraq War, yet neither he nor the two of his closest allies who were Home Secretary and Chief Whip at the time voted for the ban in the end. The next wars are not only coming, but have already begun. So here we are again.

Mind The Gulf

Christmas is our holiday, so we get to name it. See where they do not understand that, and see where they do.

The Gender War Is Also A Class War

Seán Atkinson writes:

The people who write the slogans for mental health campaigns are never the ones left waiting a year and a half to speak to a counsellor.

“Talk to someone,” say the patronising posters smothering every bus stop. But after that length of waiting, talking starts to feel pointless.

When the appointment finally comes, it’s often an overworked, taxpayer-funded doctor counting down the minutes, handing out a prescription faster than a diagnosis. Not because they don’t care, but because there isn’t time to understand a life inside a system designed to process volume, not people.

The gap between condescending messaging and reality is hard to ignore. For most people, these campaigns don’t feel supportive — they feel like a reminder of what doesn’t exist. The people who design them live in a world where help is presumed to be available somewhere down the line. They don’t live with the consequences when it isn’t.

They are not the ones choosing between paying for counselling or putting food on the table. And that’s just mental health. They certainly aren’t the ones burying children who died waiting for basic surgery. They are not the ones ringing charities to ask for help paying for their da’s funeral, because the system broke him long before it buried him.

Every failed policy, every collapsed service, every rent hike, every imported belief system lands somewhere. And it lands most heavily on the working class. In that sense, every failure of governance becomes another quiet war.

So, why would gender be any different?

If you’ve been unlucky, you know the process. You see the advice on a bus stop. You decide to take it seriously. You get a GP appointment. You’re placed on a waiting list. Then you wait. And wait. When you finally sit down, there’s no room for context or curiosity. Just medication, because medication is faster than understanding. You ask for counselling and often receive a higher dose instead. The prescription sits in the pharmacy, uncollected, while you’re sent back to waiting.

That is how adult mental distress is handled. Many come out the other side double-dosed and humiliated. And when a system gets away with dismissing adult distress for long enough, it shouldn’t surprise us when children are eventually pulled into the same logic.

So when a child experiences discomfort with their body, long before they have the maturity to fully understand it, the system responds in the way it already knows.

Speed. Medication. Next. That’s what care looks like when understanding becomes unaffordable.

The only real difference is that this pathway is now labelled autonomy.

Gender distress hasn’t entered a system designed for care. It has entered a system already accustomed to shallow solutions. One that manages symptoms rather than understanding causes. A system more comfortable prescribing than asking difficult questions.

Whatever you believe about gender identity, we know that some children experience this distress. Real or not real, it deserves depth, patience, and the ability to cope with regret.

The kind of care that doesn’t exist for adults, nevermind children.

And these children deserve more than being processed through a system that cannot explain itself, support failure, or absorb uncertainty in organisations that already struggle to cope when things go wrong.

The only way to reach the root of distress is by asking questions. But questions carry risk. Curiosity creates uncertainty, and uncertainty, in a highly politicised environment, creates complaints. Whereas affirmation only creates paperwork, and the appearance of resolution.

This has become an incentive structure where moving forward is safe, and stopping to ask questions is not.

All we have is a one way system where forward movement is fast. Reversal is slow, unsupported, or denied altogether. When things go wrong, the system that rushed people through has no capacity to catch them on the way back.

Middle and upper-class families can often escape this with access to private care, second opinions, or overseas specialists. The working class cannot. They remain on public waiting lists, trapped in systems that don’t know how to help them and are often too afraid to try.

Where is the autonomy in that?

Much of the pro-puberty blockers argument assumes a level of choice that simply doesn’t exist for most people. Choice requires time, money, and energy. Hobbies are a privilege. Lifestyle politics is a privilege.

That’s easy to forget when middle-class activists are demanding boycotts from people rubbing coins together to buy an apple. Survival leaves little room for experimentation, and even less room for life-altering mistakes.

The people who are most committed to ideological purity are often the most protected from consequence. When decisions backfire, there is support, flexibility, and a way out. For everyone else, autonomy evaporates the minute something goes wrong.

That question remains unanswered: Who is there when the promised autonomy fails?

That lack of choice and autonomy lands hardest on the working class. Working class women rely heavily on public spaces, from bathrooms to changing rooms — places most of the celebrities waving flags will never have to use.

The same applies at work. Many women are expected to comply when HR departments instruct them on language or require them to share intimate spaces under new policies. Refusal is framed as a moral failing, not a question of rent, childcare, or keeping the lights on. And when you rely on that job, “just leave” isn’t an option.

It is easy to redesign shared spaces when you can always afford to walk away from them. If you complain, you risk your job. And if you lose your job, then what? The script never seems to fail for the people who didn’t have to live inside it.

New policies always land hardest on those least able to fight back. The people who can’t afford a lawyer, can’t risk unemployment, do not have a major platform, and can’t absorb another institutional failure.

In the end, this isn’t a battle between compassion and cruelty. It is a system that has repeatedly mistaken affirmation for understanding. The difference this time is how heavily ideological the mistake has become, and how predictably the cost will again be paid by the working class.

When understanding is replaced with affirmation, systems fail downward, and never toward the people who wrote the slogans.

Visit The Living Stones

The vitally important The Stones Cry Out has been circulating again, and Professor Daoud Kuttab writes:

I was born in Bethlehem in an evangelical home. My late father, George Kuttab, was pastor of the town’s Church of God. I attended college at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania, and then returned home and married in the Baptist Church.

Ironically, my birthplace and our homeland were and continue to exist, as they did when Jesus was born, under a foreign occupation.

While Palestinians, like me, are looking for peaceful nonviolent ways to attain our right to self-determination and statehood, international forces appear intent, whether knowingly or not, in preventing this right for all people.

The exaggerated Israeli response to the brutal act by Hamas on October 7 has produced a changed international environment more supportive of Palestinian rights. As of this writing, 80 percent of UN member states and four out of five of UN permanent security members have recognized Palestine on the June 4, 1967 borders.

But one particular group, which is close to our evangelical faith, has chosen a different path and has become the biggest supporters of Israel’s violent crimes against our people, including Palestinian Christians in Gaza and the West Bank. 

Pro-Israeli Christians, sometimes referred to as Christian Zionists, have been weaponizing Israeli aggression through warped justification of biblical texts, while ignoring the living Palestinian Christians. These expressions are not only made from pulpits but are illustrated in action. Visits, often paid for by the Israeli government, reflect a clear political bias towards one party of the conflict at the expense of its Palestinian victims who have been exiled without being allowed to return despite UN resolutions and the 5 million Palestinians living under a military occupation that has violated the Geneva Convention by bringing foreign citizens to live in occupied areas.

An example of this bias was illustrated when 1,000 U.S. pastors made a visit to the region in early December, paid for by the state of Israel, and totally ignored Palestinians, including Palestinian Christians.

Their act was not new; in President Donald Trump’s first term, the former Vice President Mike Pence and dozens of top U.S. political Christian leaders similarly ignored us. Pence was photographed approvingly signing U.S.-made bombs that Israel used in its war against Palestinians and Lebanese.

The Church of the Holy Sepulcher, located in Jerusalem’s Old City, is often overlooked. At the same time, many Christians are photographed paying homage at the Western Wall, donning the Jewish kippah and placing notes with prayers between its ancient stones. There is of course nothing wrong with visiting the Western Wall. But for a self-described Christian leader to avoid the church where Christ was buried and rose again, and to avoid meeting with the body of Christ, local committed Christians, is hard to fathom, and has raised many legitimate questions. (To be fair, Vice President J.D. Vance did break the routine by visiting the Church of the holy sepulcher back on October 23 during his visit aimed at bolstering Trump’s ceasefire, which Israel has repeatedly violated according to UN officials and even the White House.)

The one-sided visit of the American pastors who met with an Israeli leader wanted by the International Criminal Court produced a slew of articles, including in these pages. Soon after The American Conservative’s article, U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee paid a visit to Bethlehem. Posting on his X account, “We sang ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ in church this morning & in the afternoon @janethuckabee & I went to actual Bethlehem & visited the beautifully decorated Manger Square, Church of Nativity & stunning Christmas tree. A cordial welcome from the people there. Special time to go there!”

It is unclear whether Vance’s visit to the church or the ambassador’s meeting with the mayor of Bethlehem and getting a photo from his balcony are connected to the U.S.-sponsored ceasefire in Gaza, or whether it reflects a reaction to the legitimate concerns of Palestinian Christians. Still, neither Vance nor Huckabee has yet to meet with local Christians. As Jack Sara, president of the Bethlehem Bible College, told the New York Times last August, “We are not on his radar screen.”

Palestinian Christians have, for some time, spoken out against Christian Zionists, condemning their support for what many view as genocide and war crimes against Palestinians, particularly in Gaza. It would be one thing if the visitors would visit all holy places in Jerusalem, but to exclude the holy place of their own faith and ignore fellow Christian believers raises many eyebrows.

Vance and Huckabee will probably be praised for the seemingly ordinary act of visiting a holy site of his own religion. Yet the very fact that such a visit is treated as exceptional highlights the abnormality that has become routine: Church leaders appear to downplay their own faith to signal loyalty to Israel and its vision of Jewish supremacy in the Holy Land. My call to action to Church leaders: visit the living Palestinian stones, the actual local Christians making up the body of Christ in Palestine.

Merry Christmas

The first recorded use of this greeting was on 22 December 1534, in a letter to Thomas Cromwell from Saint John Fisher.

Imprisoned in the Tower of London, Saint John asked for clothing and food, concluding, “And this our Lord God send you a merry Christmas.”

Food For Thought

Numerous suicides later, the individual threshold for the farm tax will rise from one million pounds to £2.5 million, so that couples with estates of up to five million pounds will pay no inheritance tax on them.

Does Markus Campbell-Savours get the whip back? After the fiasco of the MPs who lost it for having voted to lift the two-child benefit cap, this is becoming a habit. Like the withdrawal of the Winter Fuel Payment, that cap was also absolutely sacrosanct until it wasn't.

This time, someone must have explained very slowly what farms did and that you could not fight a war if you imported all your food. But all of these austerity measures had been, and the remaining ones still are, to pay for the military expansion of a NATO that, when the United States has appointed a Special Envoy to secure the annexation of Greenland from Denmark, has already ceased to exist.

Touching Tales?

There should be no anonymity either for adult accusers or for the adult accused. Philip Young, Norman Macksoni, Dean Hamilton, Connor Sanderson Doyle, Richard Wilkins and Mohammed Hassan are innocent until proven guilty of any offence against Joanne Young. I have been right about Cardinal Pell, Julian Assange, Alex Salmond, Ched Evans, and the victims of Freya Heath, whose conviction was merely set aside on a procedural technicality. I disliked Russell Brand when that got me abused hysterically by those of my contemporaries who thought that Blairite politics made them the cool kids, and who have never grown up to this day, even if they have changed their tune on him. But I point out, as I always have, that he has never been convicted of anything. It took long enough to charge him.

While I am sure that I could stand no more than a few seconds in the company of Andrew Tate, I cannot imagine that the United States would allow a white liberal American citizen to be treated as he has been. You need a visa to work in Spain or France these days, and Mason Greenwood secured them to enable him to be loaned to Getafe and then signed to Marseille, so that recording was provenly false. For the second time, in fact, since if it had been genuine, then the Crown Prosecution Service would have proceeded with what would therefore have been an open-and-shut case against him.

This has nothing to do with liking anyone. The beatification will presumably be the occasion of a Papal Visit to Australia, but if possible I shall be in Rome for Cardinal Pell's canonisation. To have kept Assange's work going, then I would have died in his stead. While I am opposed to the marrow of my bones to the political cause to which Salmond devoted his life, I expect that he and I would have got on. But I doubt that Evans or Greenwood and I would find much to talk about. I know that Heath's victims and I would have more than enough for a very heated discussion. I have already said what I thought of Tate and of who Brand used to be, as he himself broadly says these days.

But like the Epstein Files, the assailants of Gisèle Pelicot exemplify an inferior and unassimilable culture with no respect for women and with endemic predation on young girls. It remains to be seen whether provincial Toryland is another such. If so, then that is parallel societies for you. Successive Governments have allowed them to fester.

Toxic

What is the specific, practical effect of Russian, Iranian or, although there is some of this, even Chinese influence in British politics? Nathan Gill made some speeches. He should not have, but that was all he did. And what, if anything, followed from them? What did they achieve?

Yet at Turning Point USA's AmericaFest in Phoenix, Arizona, platform speaker after platform speaker has been floored from the floor, most notably Ben Shapiro by Nicky Rudd, as the rising generation demanded answers about Israeli influence in American politics, about anti-Christianity in the Talmud, about violence against Christians on the part of West Bank settlers and the IDF, and about the USS Liberty. Let America cough so that we might catch some of that cold in Britain.

For the time being, though, Russell Brand regaled the attendees with the wonders of Advance UK, which they must not have known had already removed at least one activist from its meetings for having made those points. I first called him "Toxic Brand" as long ago as 2008, when he had that business with Jonathan Ross and the late Andrew Sachs. Even then, into our thirties, the Blairites thought that they were still my generation's cool kids. And oh, how they hated me for not falling at his feet. There was nothing #MeToo about New Labour in its heyday. 

In 2014, when Brand's book Revolution came out as the ideal Christmas present for the relative you hated, then I was as critical as everyone from Sunny Hundal, through Labour Uncut, via the Daily Mirror, to the Morning Star. We all recognised him as a figure of the libertarian ultra-Right, with views indistinguishable from those of Ayn Rand. That fact was also gushingly celebrated by Nigel Farage in The Independent. I offered to pay Brand's rail fare to the Durham Miners' Gala, to see how it would have received him. Furthermore, I for one recognised a man who was older than I was, who even then was the age of a Cabinet Minister, and who was easily old enough to have had teenage children, yet who thought that 20 lost years of drug-induced torpor made him the voice of youth, or indeed of anything at all.

Brand's perpetually adolescent erstwhile admirers are still there, now in the form of Labour Together, which among other things is campaigning to repeal even the heavily watered down Employment Rights Act, and the Resolution Foundation, which was largely responsible for that dilution, as well as contending that billionaires could not be taxed but cripples could because cripples could not move. Only three MPs were ever members of the Militant Tendency, and there was no suggestion of having any of them on the frontbench or anywhere near it. This level of entryism is something else.

It Could Be You

It never occurs to them that they might lose their jobs, or become too ill to work, or unexpectedly find that they were expecting a third child.

It never occurs to them that they might be unfairly dismissed, or be driven to the wall by an exorbitant ground rent.

And it never occurs to them that they might be wrongly accused of an offence that was currently eligible for trial by jury, or that they might be wrongly convicted or sentenced by a Magistrates' Court.

But any of those things could happen to them. Any of those things could happen to anyone. Or could they? If we were being governed by people to whom they really could not, then the problem would be even worse than we had realised. Is it? Are we?

On The Money

When the Treasury is “borrowing” far more than had been “expected”, the £100 limit on contactless card payments is to be lifted from March. As much as anything else, of which there is an awful lot here, the Government refuses to protect the right to use cash. This is not about being against cards or apps. I use mine all the time. This is about vulnerable people, local circular economies, and civil liberties. In France, Article 642-3 of the penal code bans traders from refusing cash payment. We need that here. No, the legal tender thing does not cover it. You are not in debt to the vendor until you have the goods.

A suspicious number of those who decry us sceptics of the cashless society also claim that we are under constant threat of cyberattacks, and a surprising number of those who are forthright against the cashless society are enthusiasts for cryptocurrencies, about which the clue is in the name. In the cashless economy, every penny that we spent would be tracked. Cryptocurrencies are beyond democratic political control. And the combination of the two would be, and increasingly is, that level of tracking by those who were thus unaccountable.

With the price of gold at a record high, the hoary old chestnut about Gordon Brown and the gold reserves is back, even though a sovereign state with its own free-floating fiat currency has no need of such reserves, even though no one objected at the time, even though none of this could have been predicted then, even though Labour won the next two General Elections, even though Brown became Prime Minister in that third term, and even though he might have remained so if he had been properly supported by those on his own side who instead refused to accept the legitimacy of any Leadership or Premiership except that of Tony Blair, but who would settle provisionally for David Cameron.

The issuing of currency is an act of the State, which is literally the creator of all money. It says so on the banknotes. That is another reason to keep them. As a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency, the United Kingdom has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect, means that therefore need to be under democratic political control, since the responsibility of the Government is to give that currency its value while ensuring the supply of goods and services to be purchased in it.

It is impossible for the currency-issuing State to run out of money. Money “lent” to the Treasury by the Bank of England is money “lent” to the State by the State; such “debt” will never be called in, much less will bailiffs be sent round. Call this “the Magic Money Tree” if you will. There is no comparison between running the economy and managing a household budget, or even a business. There is no “national credit card” to “max out”. “Fiscal headroom” is only the gap between the Government’s tax and spending plans and what would be allowed under the fiscal rules that it sets for itself and changes frequently.

That is what both fiscal policy and monetary policy are for: to give the currency its value by controlling inflation to a politically chosen extent while discouraging certain politically chosen forms of behaviour, and while encouraging others, including economic equality, which is fundamental to social cohesion and thus to patriotism. There is no debt. It is an accounting trick. The Treasury, which is the State, has issued bonds to the Bank of England, which is the State. Even if those bonds were held by anyone else, then the State could simply issue itself with enough of its own free-floating, fiat currency to redeem them. Taxation is not where the State’s money comes from. Nothing is “unaffordable”, every recession is discretionary on the part of the Government, and there is no such thing as “taxpayers’ money”. Say it again that there is no debt. There is no debt. There is no debt.

Make It Make Sense

20,000 or more foxhounds, which would be completely unsuitable as pets, will be destroyed to save, well, how many foxes, more or less? It will be illegal to boil a lobster alive, but legal to abort a child at nine months' gestation, or to assist the suicide of her mother. No one is to be allowed social media until the new voting age of 16, two years below the school leaving age that will soon be the age of conscription, but there is to be no minimum age for experimental puberty blockers the adverse effects of which had already caused them to be banned in sheep.

The arrest, though not yet the charging, of people who shouted the inadvisable "Globalise the Intifada" or that echo of the Likud Charter which is "From the River to the Sea", is welcomed by those who thought that Lucy Connolly ought not to have been imprisoned for having successfully incited arson with intent to endanger life, nor Luke Yarwood for having tweeted, "Violence and murder is the only way now. Start off burning every migrant hotel then head off to MP houses in Parliament. We need to take over by FORCE."

It is considered scandalous that Hayden Davies has been given 13 years by a court in Donetsk for having travelled to Ukraine to fight for the side that Britain was backing there but which was about to lose, yet it is considered perfectly reasonable to denaturalise Shabina Begum and to ban her for life from this country because she had been trafficked to Syria as a sex slave for the side that Britain was backing there and which had now won. Having won, that side has bombed the Iowa National Guard, so the Americans are having to retaliate against that latest indication that no one important had read Frankenstein.

But Britain provides arms and intelligence to those who bombed James Kirby, James Henderson and John Chapman three times to make sure that they were dead, while marches in support of those whom our veterans had been aiding are to be banned because of the deaths, more than five times further away than Gaza, of five thousand times fewer people than had so far been killed there. Having been pouted at for "not talking about Sudan" and other places, we, the only people who ever did talk about them, are castigated for still talking about anywhere other than white and wealthy Bondi Beach.

And so on, and on, and on, and on, and on. Even the few things that have a certain logic are all the more horrific for it. Of course elections are being cancelled in a country that was preparing to conscript its youth to die for Volodymyr Zelensky. And of course the false claim to have held Master's and doctoral degrees, a claim that had been used to secure paid employment, is no bar to appointment as a legislator for life in the country whose politics have been dominated for more than 30 years by a man who for more than 20 of them had been known to have made himself fabulously rich by having lied it into war.

No Satisfaction Guarantee

By all means support Reform UK's Local Election Guarantee Bill, but it stands no more chance of becoming law than the UK-EU Customs Union (Duty to Negotiate) Bill, and procedurally could not possibly do so before May's local elections. The Liberal Democrats' appeal to the Equality and Human Rights Commission is also a very long shot, but at least if it were ever to come to anything, then it would do so in time.

All this, and digital ID, facial recognition, the abolition of almost all trial by jury, the abolition of the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates' Court to the Crown Court, the banning of under-16s from social media while lowering the voting age to a 16 that was two years lower than the school leaving age, conscription at 18, and the packing of the House of Lords that retained an absolute veto on any attempt to extend a Parliament beyond five years. And so much for either or both of the monarchy and the European Convention on Human Rights.

Rooted In The Lived Experience

One could almost forgive Robert Buckland for being Hatfield:

During the Covid crisis in 2020, when the Lord Chief Justice and I had to suspend jury trials for several months due to the lockdown and initial difficulties in achieving safe social distancing in courts, some consideration was given to whether jury trials should be temporarily ended. Ideas such as “wartime” juries of only seven members were considered, and the use of judges and magistrates to try some “either-way” offences that could be heard either in the Magistrates or Crown court was also considered. I rejected those ideas as a disproportionate response to the problem. Instead, I ensured that legislation allowing the future use of remote juries was placed on the statute book, to help “futureproof” the system as technology continues to improve.

Since that time, we have understandably continued to hear a lot about the growing backlog of cases being heard by the Crown Court. In my view, there’s been far too little discussion about the surge in online and digital content, mainly from social media, that lawyers and judges have had to address in cases over the past decade or so. This has added substantially to delays in the investigation and prosecution of offences in ways that could not have been foreseen at the turn of the century. In my strong view, it is this phenomenon, not the use of juries, that is the cause of backlogs and delays, as the criminal justice system itself has not kept pace with technology.

The positives and negatives of the Government’s plans

The Government’s announcement last month of significant changes to the jury system came as something of a thunderclap. Although the former President of the then Queen’s Bench Division, Sir Brian Leveson, had been working on a lengthy review of the system and had issued Part One of his report earlier this year, the second part of his deliberations, with all-important technological recommendations, was still being awaited. The surprise came via a leak to the Times newspaper that the Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary, David Lammy, was in fact planning to limit jury trials to all but the most serious of criminal cases.

His actual announcement, however, made to Parliament in late November, fell short of that but still went way beyond the recommendations in Leveson Part One. Lammy’s statement, plus a press release on the gov.uk website, seem to be the basis for this dramatic policy change. There has been no White Paper process, let alone a wider Green Paper consultation of a kind that seems to be increasingly rare in modern government policymaking, and whose increased absence should be regretted.

Firstly, the positives. The Justice Secretary announced up to £34 million per year in additional funding for criminal legal aid advocates, and accepted Leveson’s recommendation to match-fund a number of pupillages in criminal law. It seems that a three-year settlement as to the number of Crown Court sitting days will also be sought by agreement with the judiciary, which is a sensible way forward.

Then to what I regard as the less positive aspects of the announcement. Using the projected Crown Court back log of 100,000 cases by 2028, Lammy has made this the reason for an end to jury trials in a whole swathe of criminal cases, creating instead what he calls “Swift Courts” within the Crown Court, with a judge alone deciding verdicts in triable either-way cases with a likely sentence of three years or less. Lammy made it clear that whilst juries’ deliberations remain confidential, judges will provide reasoning for their verdicts in open court. I expect this aspect of the changes to be particularly complex and another illustration of the law of unintended consequences.

The right of defendants to elect for a jury trial will be removed, with the decision being made instead by judges and magistrates. Appeals from the magistrates’ courts will be limited to points of law only, ending the “de novo” Crown Court appeal hearing by a judge and two magistrates. Judges will be permitted to sit without a jury in exceptionally technical and lengthy fraud and financial trials, which is a return to the reform introduced by the Blair government but scrapped after 2010. Magistrates’ court sentencing powers will be increased to 18 months, with a power to extend that to two years, should it become necessary. It doesn’t seem that Lammy is deterred by recent experience of an increase to Magistrates’ powers of sentencing, which contributed to an increase in prison numbers! I resisted such change, precisely for those reasons. All of this will require legislative change, so we can expect a new Bill in 2026.

The historical roots and democratic significance of jury trial

The jury’s importance is rooted in a history that has shaped not merely legal doctrine, but the very character of liberty in this jurisdiction. The right to be judged by one’s peers has symbolised the idea that coercive state power is tempered by the collective conscience of the community. That principle is well-illustrated in Bushell’s Case of 1670, in the John Wilkes litigation of the 1760s.

Bushell’s Case arose from the trial of the Quakers William Penn and William Mead, whose jurors refused to return the guilty verdict the court demanded. When fined and imprisoned for their refusal, the jurors sought habeas corpus. Vaughan CJ held that a jury could not be sanctioned for its verdict: the independence of the jury was a constitutional requirement, because the truth of a verdict arises from the jurors’ honest assessment of the evidence, not judicial direction or executive pressure. The case entrenched the principle that the State must accept the risk of civilian disagreement.

A century later, John Wilkes, prosecuted for seditious libel and repeatedly elected to Parliament in defiance of the government, became a symbol of the tension between Crown power and popular will. Juries repeatedly refused to convict him despite doctrinal authority supporting conviction. They acted as a constitutional mediator, reflecting the community’s belief that the enforcement of seditious libel laws was inconsistent with emerging notions of political liberty. In doing so, juries helped set the trajectory towards modern democratic speech protections. The episodes demonstrate that the jury can serve as a safety valve in times when the law lags behind constitutional values.

Bushell and Wilkes, taken together, articulate a central principle: the jury is a democratic check on state authority, rooted in the lived experience of its citizens.

The jury performs three constitutionally significant functions. First, it provides diverse reasoning, where evidence is tested and viewed through multiple perspectives. Second, it ensures democratic legitimacy, making the decision to convict or acquit one for ordinary citizens, not a professional authority. Third, it operates as a control mechanism on the punitive power of the State.

The potential consequences of the proposed reforms

Removing juries from a large category of offences risks narrowing the channels through which public values flow into criminal law. Many either-way offences, including lower-level dishonesty, assaults involving credibility disputes, and certain sexual offences, involve contested narratives and social standards that a jury is uniquely placed to interpret. These are precisely the issues where the community’s conscience is often central to the achievement of just outcomes.

On capacity, there is a practical concern: judge-alone trials on a large scale require more judges, more courtrooms, and more specialist training. Without significant investment, the reform may simply move the source of delay rather than eliminate it. The giving of reasons by judges will expand their work significantly and create more points of appeal. It does not seem that any assessment as to the impact on the Court of Appeal Criminal Division has been made. The Government will have to produce Impact Assessments as part of its pre-legislative preparation. I urge the Ministry of Justice to start being fully transparent about this process and share it with interested and expert third parties as soon as possible.

Yet some reform is clearly necessary. My argument is that reform should seek to deal with the real causes of delay, namely an analogue court system that should be using assistive technology and agentic AI to perform many administrative tasks and to help with the assessment of digital material. Technology should be brought forward urgently, not as a replacement for juries, but as an assistive tool deployed to help both them and judges do their jobs as efficiently as possible. That would be effective and purposeful change, not these ill-thought out proposals.

Hunt Balls?

Games of cops and robbers sometimes descend into real violence, and that needs to be dealt with. The provisions already exist, and the primary responsibility rests with the parents. Likewise, what we must now call trail hunts sometimes end up with the killing of a fox or other quarry by the hounds, and that needs to be dealt with. The provisions already exist, and the primary responsibility rests with the owners.

I have never liked the hunting ban. Tony Blair used it to buy support for the Iraq War, yet neither he nor the two of his closest allies who were Home Secretary and Chief Whip at the time voted for it in the end. Far more parliamentary time was spent on it than on vastly more urgent matters, and that has remained the case, right down to the Assisted Suicide Bill. As Robert Winston asked in the House of Lords at the time, were they going to ban kosher and halal meat next?

"What about halal meat, eh?", the BNP used to yap in those days, although it and its successors have never said whether they would support the hunting ban if there were also a ban on halal slaughter. Those successors are at it again today. The Greens wanted to ban halal slaughter until it was pointed out that that would have entailed banning kosher slaughter as well. Only Rupert Lowe says bluntly that he would ban both. He is wrong, but it is no wonder that he is out of Reform UK, that he is never on GB News, and that he is not seen on any platform with Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. As for Reform, its resident grandee is Ann Widdecombe, who supports both a ban on foxhunting and, like Lowe, the restoration of capital punishment. As Chesterton said, wherever there is animal worship, there is human sacrifice.

So by all means let there be higher standards in farm welfare. Along with a ban on the importation of products that did not meet them. On animal welfare and on environmental responsibility, on consumer protection and on workers' rights, international trade agreements should only ever level up at least to the highest standards that were already in place among the participants, and preferably beyond those.

That’s Not Justice

There is a word for the merger of State and corporate power to the point of physical violence. As the indefatigable Tristan Kirk writes:

Magistrates are sitting in secret to allow utility companies to break into people’s homes, granting warrants based on applications they have never even seen, a London Standard investigation has found.

Energy firms and the courts were rocked by scandal in late 2022 when it was revealed that hundreds of thousands of warrants – including for the homes of some of Britain’s poorest people – were being “waved through” by magistrates.

The government promised a clean-up of the practices, including more help for vulnerable families, and a new court process was designed to deal with applications for warrants.

But a year-long probe by The Standard has uncovered disturbing practices at courts across England and Wales, with magistrates now doing their work almost entirely in secret and handing out hundreds of warrants at a time without ever looking at the applications.

Huge amounts of trust is being placed in debt agencies working for energy firms, and when failures to abide by the law are actually uncovered, they are swiftly brushed aside.

Magistrates also appear to be allowed to carry out the work from home, rather than in court, with officials having no clue whether they are even in the country as they dial in to hearings.

“It makes us furious that this is still going on”, said Simon Francis, who leads the campaign group End Fuel Poverty Coalition.

“It’s not just about people getting behind on their energy bills, it’s getting a warrant to break into people’s homes.

“We know there is pressure on the court system, but having your home broken into without a magistrate having looked at the documents – that’s not justice.”

The original utility warrants scandal broke in late 2022, when the i newspaper reported on vulnerable families, many of whom had been hit by the cost-of-living crisis, having agents for energy firms breaking into their homes and fitting expensive pre-paid meters.

It emerged that magistrates courts across the country were approving mass batches of warrants for debt agencies acting for the utility companies.

Hearings that were observed in open court lasted just a few minutes as large bundles of warrant applications were simply rubber-stamped.

In response to the scandal, a temporary halt was placed on the fitting of pre-paid meters, energy firms have been made to pay out £70m in compensation, and regulator Ofgem has opened investigations into the practices of British Gas, Utilita and Ovo.

A new court system for the approval of warrants was drawn up and approved by Chief Magistrate Paul Goldspring in April 2024, intending to create greater safeguards in the system.

These included requirements for energy firms to give at least ten days’ notice of a warrant being applied for, to make at least ten attempts to contact someone before asking a court to approve the fitting of a pre-paid meter, and only going to court after a month has passed since the last bill went unpaid.

The judge also opened the door for uncontested warrant applications to be deal with en masse in private court sessions, by writing into the rules that “there is no requirement for applications to be heard in open court”.

Flaws in the process

The Standard was granted permission to watch one of the private session at Uxbridge magistrates court in November last year, as a magistrate and a legal adviser went through the process on an Microsoft Teams call, with an agent for the utility companies unable to be seen while joining by phone.

Following the Chief Magistrate’s rules, the agent swore on oath to tell the truth and answered general questions about all 131 applications he was presenting, suggesting all those affected by the warrants had been visited, properly informed of their human rights, and there is justification for entering the premises.

Then ten applications were selected at random and checked in detail. However, two failed as the agent accepted that one of the rules on giving time to respond had not been complied with.

Those two warrant applications were withdrawn and two more were selected at random, and they passed.

With a total of ten now satisfactorily scrutinised, the magistrate then approved the rest of the warrants in a stroke, bringing the hearing to a close.

No attempt was made to check if any of the other applications had suffered the same failings as the two that were scrutinised and then withdrawn.

The Standard asked officials at Uxbridge magistrates court to see the paperwork that underpinned the hearing, to independently check if the process is working as intended.

After being put through a legal disclosure process that lasted a staggering ten months, it was revealed that the court does not even hold the full written applications for warrants, even though the Chief Magistrate had directed that courts must receive a “file which comprises the written information for each case”.

At the hearing The Standard attended, the magistrate was able to see names and addresses of the proposed subjects of the warrants, together with a copy and paste justification to enter premises “in order to inspect the fittings, pipes, lines or plant, to ascertain the quantity of fuel conveyed to the premises, to cut off or discontinue the supply, to ascertain whether the supply has been reconnected following disconnection, to remove or replace any meter or other fitting, or do any other such thing for which they have a right of entry under Schedule 6 of the Electricity Act 1989 if needs be by force.”

All the warrants were sought by Blackthorne Utilities, a company which specialises in administrative support to the energy sector. The utility companies whose bills are said to have gone unpaid were not even named on the court papers.

While Blackthorne’s agent had sworn an oath to tell the truth, the information provided orally to the magistrate about the 12 scrutinised warrants could not be independently checked by the court, as there was no detailed paperwork uploaded to the system.

It is understood that the same system is used at courts around the country every week, and in an October 2024 memo, magistrates court legal advisors were advised by a senior figure at HMCTS that while some District judges ask to “see the Information… seeing it isn’t necessary”.

Tom Franklin, chief executive of the Magistrates Association, said whole batches of applications should be rejected if there are concerns that failures to comply with legal requirements go beyond isolated cases.

“Experience has shown that the relevant evidence is the same in the vast majority of cases, so the court selects a random sample of applications from the batch and scrutinises them”, he set out.

“As long as the magistrates are satisfied from the sampled cases that the correct procedures were followed by the utility company – including ensuring that vulnerable people haven’t been unfairly treated – the rest of that batch of applications would be granted, following confirmation of the information on oath.

“If any of the sampled applications do not pass scrutiny, the magistrate should reject that application and continue sampling until they were satisfied that the failure was isolated or a one-off, in which case they can approve the batch.

“If however, the magistrate is not satisfied after this further sampling (ie: they find more failed applications), they should reject the whole batch of applications.”

Secret justice

When utility companies seek warrants to enter homes and businesses, because of unpaid bills, suspected faults, or suspicious activity, the subjects are usually written to in advance. A small number contest the warrant, but most do respond before a court is asked for approval.

The Standard’s attempts to observe and scrutinise the uncontested warrants system has been met with unprecedented levels of secrecy and misdirection, lasting more than a year.

At the conclusion of the hearing in Uxbridge last November, the legal advisor was asked whether what had just taken place was in open court, and neither she nor the magistrate could provide a firm answer.

A court official later said the hearing had not been conducted in open court.

Before the paperwork for the hearing could be disclosed to the media, a District Judge at Uxbridge insisted that all the utility companies involved and every single one of the 131 subjects of the warrant applications had to be contacted to check if they objected.

That process lasted five months, turning up a handful of replies. There was then an unexplained further five month delay before a judge released the papers, confirming that since the information they contained amounted to little more than a list of names, addresses, and debt figures, there was no issue with providing it to a journalist.

“This to me, although on an excel spreadsheet and therefore in a slightly different format, is no different to any other court list which would be available to the press”, wrote District Judge Kathryn Verghis, in her judgment.

Members of the public are blocked from watching the private hearings, and while journalists can ask to observe uncontested warrants being granted, they must do so with no advance information of the types of cases being handled.

In reality, that means that few – if any journalists – will speculatively seek to watch the hearings.

HM Courts and Tribunal Service (HMCTS) has refused to provide the lists of warrants granted in the early part of the year, insisting it would take too long.

In the hunt for information, The Standard was put through a fruitless month-long Freedom of Information process to try to access the court lists, only to then be told that they are exempt from FOI laws.

And a HMCTS spokesperson cited security concerns for refusing to provide lists of warrant applications in London on a rolling weekly basis.

“The procedures for utility warrant applications are set out by the independent judiciary, which all courts must follow to ensure appropriate scrutiny”, they said.

“There is no legal requirement for uncontested warrants to be heard in open court. Often warrants involve highly sensitive information that can’t be shared publicly or may put police investigations at risk. We try to accommodate press attendance for hearings where possible.”

As a result, the hearings that take place are effectively secret, and it is impossible to determine how many thousands of warrants are granted by the courts each week.

The scandal has strong echoes of concerns around the Single Justice Procedure, which is similarly allowed to operate behind-closed-doors, avoiding proper scrutiny of the work of the magistrates court.

In 2023, it was reported that magistrates could determine as many as 1,000 warrant applications at a time, in hearings lasting just 15 minutes. And the i newspaper found evidence of more than 500,000 warrants had been granted in the space of a year and a half.

In November 2023, when the new court process was being developed, End Fuel Poverty Coalition wrote to Ministers to raise concerns that a “cloak of secrecy” appeared to have remained in place, pointing to uncertainty over journalist access to information.

“The same old magistrates’ practices seem to have continued”, they wrote. “Distant hearings, nodding through batch applications, not checking for vulnerability and a failure to inform customers that they are due to have their case heard. No one can be confident of getting justice under the current system.”

Mr Francis said this week that the system appears to be a “kangaroo court”, and said their 2023 concerns were never answered.

Tom Franklin from the Magistrates Association told The Standard: “We are very concerned by the suggestion that in some instances these procedures are not being followed by utility companies, and that your reporter had such difficulty gaining access to see these cases for himself.

“We firmly believe that justice must not just be done, but that it must be seen to be done, and know the immense value of accredited journalists being able to attend cases heard in the magistrates’ courts”.

Work from home?

The Standard also questioned the arrangements for the hearings, using an Microsoft Teams link instead of the Cloud Video Platform (CVP) which is in widespread use across the courts.

In the 2024 rules, the Chief Magistrate allowed that “uncontested hearings will be held by live link”.

HMCTS says Teams is permitted for use in these hearings, and relies on a 2021 version of the Magistrates Court Rules that says a livelink can be agreed to “on application or on the court’s own initiative”.

When questioned, it asserted that there is no need for an actual application or court direction for each hearing.

Rules were drawn up during the pandemic that allowed magistrates to dial in to court hearings from home, but that law was repealed in 2022.

HMCTS said it does not know where each magistrate is located when they deal with warrant applications online, directing questions instead to the judiciary.

The Standard has asked the Judicial Office for clarity on whether magistrates are permitted to do their work from home, their regular place of work, or even from a different country.

A judicial spokesperson said: “The Chief Magistrate is investigating concerns raised, and we will respond fully in due course.”

The 2022 utility warrants scandal prompted a national firestorm over the behaviour of energy firms, particularly towards vulnerable customers, and the way the courts were operating.

Promises of reform and better practices were made, but the outcome appears to be a process that is even less transparent than before, is harbouring potential flaws, and as a consequence will lack credibility with the public.

And:

Dashing for the lift at Southwark Crown Court is a barrister late for his first hearing of the day. Juggling a gown, a half-drunk coffee, and a horsehair wig, he has just seven minutes before court is due to start.

“Don’t worry, don’t rush”, says a fellow barrister, holding open the lift doors. “Van’s not here.”

Three words that are depressingly familiar to lawyers and court users across the country.

The behind-schedule barrister knew in an instant that he need not worry about holding up court proceedings and risking the wrath of a judge. But he also knew it would be yet another day marred by delays.

The “van” is the secure transport which brings prisoners from jails to courts on days when they are due in the dock. Without the defendant, there is precious little that can be achieved.

The official statistics paint a positive picture of defendants in custody being brought to court punctually almost all the time. More than 99 per cent of the time, in fact. But those in court know that in reality there is a chronic problem, now brought into sharp relief when the government is contemplating scaling back jury trials in its search for ways to speed up the justice process.

The Labour government’s controversial plans come as the case backlog in the Crown Court reaches 80,000, with some trials now being listed in London as far away as 2030.

The idea of juryless trials in the Crown Court – first floated in the summer following an independent review by retired judge Sir Brian Leveson – has been embraced by Justice Secretary David Lammy.

Writing for The Standard, Mr Lammy argued the change is needed to “confront an emergency” in the criminal courts, as victims are withdrawing from cases in droves due to the chronic delays.

But his plans have been met with fierce opposition from the legal community, with lawyers pointing out daily failures in the courts system which have nothing to do with juries.

They say fixing the system and utilising the courts at maximum capacity should be tried first, before there is any attack on the ancient right to jury trial.

“David Lammy is missing solutions one to 99, and jumping to solution 100,” said criminal barrister Joanna Hardy-Susskind.

“I sit in murder trials and the defendant is being held in custody. And somebody needs to drive a van from the prison to the court. And they don’t manage it, on day one, day two, they don’t manage it for weeks. And we sit there waiting and time is lost.

“I sit in courtrooms where we have to send the jury home and they are sitting there in hats and scarves, and they can’t decide the verdict.

“We deal with cases where the air conditioning won’t work and the cells are too hot to keep human beings in them. So we waste another day. It is endless.”

A chronicle of delay

On that Monday morning this month at Southwark, one of the defendants stuck in the back of the delayed prison van making its way through London is a suspected drug dealer accused of a serious assault and carrying a knife.

His case is listed for 10am, but news filters through the court staff that he’s unlikely to be in the building before 11am.

This means the hearing must go to the back of the queue, after another plea hearing scheduled for 10.30am and two sentences which will fill out the rest of the morning.

The prosecutor and the alleged drug dealer’s defence lawyer start the familiar process of shuffling their diaries. Having hoped to be on to the next case by mid-morning, this one is now going to occupy half a day at least.

Upstairs in court 10, lawyers, court staff, the judge, and jury are all sat around waiting for a defendant on trial for voyeurism to arrive.

“Maybe it’ll come on at 11am”, says the clerk, wearily, through a grimace. Nearly an hour of court time has been lost by the time the trial actually gets going.

Downstairs in another courtroom a judge sends out his jury to continue their deliberations on a trial, despite one of the three defendants not yet even being in the building.

“The defendant is not here, we’re not sure why”, observed the clerk, succinctly summarising a familiar situation for courts around the country.

The judge’s decision - that the jury’s deliberations over verdicts did not need to be held back by the prisoner transport failings – is typical of the spirit within the courts: Overcome the hurdles and take pragmatic steps to keep the wheels of justice turning.

The judge himself then got on with hearing legal argument in a different case.

Delays have become so endemic in the courts that staff, lawyers, and judges are accustomed to coping. Official reports simply are not drawn up to record every single delay - staff are already buried under heavy workloads, the bureaucracy is an extra burden, and there is scepticism that anything will actually change.

How big is the problem?

The problems with prison transport are evident in court, but determining the scale of the crisis is harder - and the government does not look likely to help with public understanding any time soon.

Last month, Justice Minister Jake Richards answered a Parliamentary question and claimed that 99.8 per cent of prisoners were “delivered on time by the Prisoner Escort and Custody Service (PECS) contractors” in the last year.

He said this figure equated to 2,151 reports of delayed prisoner arrivals at court, with 832 blamed on problems at the prison, 200 pegged on “wider system issues”, and the private PECS contractor at fault in just 1,119 instances.

When the official data is set against there being hundreds of courtrooms across 70 crown courts of England and Wales, all sitting for 50 weeks a year, it would appear that there is barely an issue to talk about. 

However, The Standard has seen official data which shows that there are very limited instances when prisoner delays are actually officially recorded.

A detailed analysis of Ministry of Justice data also shows alarming increases in the numbers of Crown Court trials having to be adjourned because a defendant in custody was not brought to court.

A total of 177 trials in London could not happen in 2023 and 2024 due to a missing defendant, and another 20 in the first three months of this year. This represents around a five-fold increase on figures from 2019.

It is commonplace in court for the prisoner transport – the notorious missing “van” – to be blamed for an absent defendant. But repeatedly in Parliament, Ministers questioned about the PECS contracts have insisted that the companies responsible – Serco in the South, GEOAmey in the North – are meeting expectations more than 99 per cent of the time.

Does the data match reality?

Earlier this year, The Standard obtained MoJ data on the performance of the prison transport service at courts around London.

Private contractors are supposed to face penalties of just over £600 in the Crown Court and £375 in the magistrates court when a defendant is at least 15 minutes late for a scheduled court hearing, and when the company is found to be at fault.

In May, across London’s crown court estate, there were 40 penalties imposed for delayed hearings. The following month, 11 penalties were imposed.

The figures are low, when compared to the scale of the problem that is known to exist. The data reveals there were no penalties at all across May and June for lateness of prisoners at the Old Bailey, Wood Green crown court, and Isleworth crown court.

HM Courts and Tribunal Service says courts themselves are supposed to report incidents of delay, and the contractor itself can also submit a report. It says performance of the contract is monitored, including with site visits to courts.

But the lack of penalties does not necessarily indicate everything is fine. Instead, it could mean delays were simply not recorded, or the transport provider was not thought to be to blame when things went wrong.

Importantly, though, a penalty may have been avoided thanks to the diligence of court staff and patience of lawyers, rearranging the hearing schedule until the prisoner has arrived so that - technically - there was no delay.

It is also understood that prison transport contacts, last signed in 2020, do not necessarily lead to penalties when a prisoner is being brought from a jail that is not local to the courthouse.

A second MoJ data release to The Standard focused on performance at Southwark crown court in June, showing there were 249 “scheduled prisoner movements” to the central London courthouse and 11 of them officially ended in a delay.

However none of those incidents led to a penalty being imposed on the PECS contractor.

Barristers have spoken to The Standard about enduring chronic delays while sitting on trials across London in the last year.

But attempts to widen the data release beyond Southwark, to examine the official records when there were known delays that derailed trials, were rejected by the MoJ.

When it was suggested that refusing to release more data would thwart proper scrutiny of the system, the MoJ took exception to this being characterised as “blocking”. But it did confirm that Freedom of Information requests had indeed been rejected, albeit with “a clear explanation of why some detailed information cannot be disclosed”.

“The vast majority of prisoners are delivered to court on time, with fewer than one per cent of criminal trials delayed due to late arrival where the PECS contractor is responsible”, the spokesperson insisted.

“Where delays do occur, they can stem from a range of factors – including processes within prisons and wider system pressures – and we are working across the justice system to reduce these.”

The Standard’s requests for data were turned down due to “commercial sensitivities”, as the MoJ believes that giving the public a fuller picture of prisoner delays and penalties incurred would “prejudice” the interests of its contractors.

It added that it has “detailed arrangements in place to hold suppliers to account for their performance against the contract”, including quarterly private board meetings and private reports delivered to Ministers.

When Lord Foster of Bath made a Parliamentary request for the penalties imposed on the PECS contractors broken down by courthouse and date, a Minister did not assert the need to protect commercial interests. But he refused to provide the data, blaming instead the “disproportionate cost” of answering the request.

The government’s move towards jury trial reform has not, so far, been supported by an argument that it would improve the court process itself.

It is a plan for a radical re-organisation of the justice system, to include loading more cases on to magistrates courts, blocking the right to elect a Crown Court trial for some types of crime, and switching a jury for a single judge in trials where the expected penalty would be less than three years in prison.

The strongest argument for Justice Secretary David Lammy is that the system itself is falling apart, failing victims who either endure chronic delays or walk away from the system.

Backbencher Karl Turner, MP for East Hull and a qualified criminal barrister, is among the leaders of a rebellion within Labour ranks. He has taken to sharing daily updates on social media of the scores of Crown Court rooms which sit empty every day.

The Labour government has increased sitting days to record levels since taking office last year. But last week, between 63 and 71 courtrooms sat empty each day at courts around England and Wales.

Some lawyers are talking of strikes, and Mr Lammy faces an uphill challenge to convince them and his own backbenchers that cutting down on jury trials will fix a court system where courts and docks consistently stand frustratingly empty.

‘It’s not good enough’

At Inner London crown court this month, a judge walked into his courtroom - sweltering hot due to a flawed heating system - to tackle a day’s list that included three different jury trials and two sentencing hearings.

The first 20 minutes of the day were taken up with why a man who has been continually breaking his restraining order cannot be sentenced as planned. Lawyers in the case knew before they arrived that a further hearing about the basis of his guilty plea would be needed. But the hearing was still mystifyingly listed by the court.

At 10.23am, lawyers for the first trial trooped into court, and it swiftly became obvious that the case was not ready yet.

The defendant is accused of possessing an array of drugs, the Crown Prosecution Service has decided to abandon more serious drug dealing charges, and the prosecution barrister does not know why that decision has been taken.

The 29-year-old defendant, who is in custody, has not been delivered to court on time, and misses much of the discussion as the barristers and judge pick over what should happen next.

The accused man claims to be a victim of modern slavery, exploited by criminal gangs in the drugs trade. But the key reports on this point - which will form a centrepiece of the trial - have not yet been produced.

“It’s not your fault, but it’s not good enough”, the judge tells the prosecutor, before adjourning the trial until July next year.

Next up is a man suspected of sexually assaulting a woman on the Tube last December.

The judge knows the third trial in his list takes priority, so lawyers in the case of the alleged Tube groper are sent away to see if another courtroom can host the trial.

Eventually, they realise there is simply no judge and no courtroom free to take them, and the case goes off until February next year.

Back into the hotbox of a courtroom, the judge starts his trial at 11.49am, deals with some preliminary legal argument, and then it takes eight minutes to select and swear the jury.

“Sometimes it’s too hot, sometimes it’s too cold, but it’s never just nice”, the judge tells the assembled jury of 12 members of the public, in a reference to the courthouse which has decayed in the face of years of underinvestment from government.

Along the corridor in one of Inner London’s grand old courtrooms, temperatures are similarly fiery and staff have thrown open the windows to let in the cold December air. It’s a makeshift solution to their daily problem, but also a powerful visual display of waste.

The government contends that trials can be shortened by as much as 20 per cent without a jury. Judges would no longer need to deliver an opening speech about how the trial will be conducted and they can avoid summing up the evidence at the conclusion of the case.

The main part of a trial – the evidence and legal submissions – would have to remain intact, even if only a judge was overseeing the case.

The deliberations of a jury are widely assumed to take longer than that of a judge, although there is an expectation that judges will deliver written reasons for their verdicts, a document that will take time to prepare and take them away from sitting on other court hearings.

‘The interpreter is not here’

Since the government announced its court reform agenda, some judges have made pointed comments about the value they see in the jury system.

“We cannot try cases without you. We really can’t. You are a valuable part of the system”, said Mrs Justice Norton, as she concluded a manslaughter trial at Maidstone crown court.

“The jury system is the best and fairest way of deciding the outcome of trials”, said Judge David Herbert at Northampton crown court, as he set a jury their tasks.

Lawyers have taken to social media in their droves to highlight the problems they see each day that grind the system to a halt.

Judges are given “quick” procedural hearings to deal with at 10am, ahead of their trial resuming at 10.30am, but the short case turns out to be more complex and lengthy than expected.

Equipment deployed in courtrooms to show CCTV and images during trials breaks down, forcing delays while technicians are found to fix the problem.

Cases are not sufficiently prepared by the CPS, then dropped last minute on a prosecuting barrister.

And there is a persistent issue with interpreters. They speak the wrong language or dialect, they are not booked to arrive in time for the pre-court meeting between lawyer and defendant, or they simply do not turn up at all.

Earlier this year, a woman was convicted of stealing a £188,000 collection of paintings from former Premier League footballer Edgar Davids. She maintained her innocence right up to the start of the trial, before pleading guilty as jurors were about to be chosen.

That moment - the start of her trial - was meant to be a year earlier, in September 2024, but did not happen then because something had gone wrong in organising a videolink for Mr Davids to give evidence from Dubai.

It was a basic organisational failure, but one that caused enormous delay and risked the chance of securing justice. In other circumstances, a different victim may have simply walked away rather than waiting another year.

‘Chaos’ in the courtroom

At Woolwich crown court last week, a 17-year-old boy was due to face an allegation of sexual assault. But he never made it into the dock that day.

He was an hour late from Feltham youth detention centre for the 10am hearing, and a Senegalese interpreter had been booked but did not turned up on time.

However before the case could be heard, the boy’s defence barrister revealed that the CPS uploaded the evidence to the digital case system at 5.45am on the morning of the hearing, no indictment had been drawn up, and the prosecutor had no idea who the case worker was.

“It’s like a comedy of errors”, exclaimed the defence barrister, to which the clerk replied: “It’s chaos.”

The judge, wanting to get on with her other hearings, adjourned the case for a month.

The government is telling the public that court reforms must happen to ensure that justice is done in something approaching a timely fashion. Victims deserve a prompt trial, as indeed do defendants.

But the view from many in court is that while juries sometimes take their time to reach a verdict, it is the fundamental and basic failings in the system that are the real causes of the chronic delays.

“It is not juries that cause delays”, says Riel Karmy-Jones KC, chair of the Criminal Bar Association. “Rather it is all the consequences of the years of underfunding that look set to continue: the artificial cap on sitting days, the crumbling courts, the inadequate technology, the failure to deliver prisoners to court on time, the lack of interpreters, and issues with funding of expert witnesses.

Of the legions of barristers she represents, she adds: “We have been holding things together for years. We have been warning that this day was coming, but have been ignored.”

It turns out that the PECS contractors have met their obligations if defendants arrived before 3pm, hence the figures cited by Ministers.