Like To Thank The Academy?

It would not matter on the radio, but Scott Mills and Matt Goodwin do look arrestingly alike. Goodwin could replace Mills, except that he has shown the way of doing so far more cheaply by using Artificial Intelligence instead. Never work yourself out of a job, Matty Boy. If you really did have ties to the working class, then you would know that.

Goodwin's retort to his latest critics, that his concern was now book sales, is perfectly valid. He is no longer in academia, and indeed everyone now calls him "Mr Goodwin"; his lack of objection is another sign that he is far from prolier than thou, since horny-handed sons and daughters of the toil can be very insistent on their doctorates. Whatever has become of the candidates who were doctored under Professor Goodwin? And if bilingualism is such a problem, then would he end all teaching of modern foreign languages? If not, why not? A former humanities professor, is he himself a monoglot anglophone?

Not being a mother tongue English-speaker did not prevent Rowan Williams from becoming Archbishop of Canterbury, and his successor but one knew exactly which buttons to press at her installation, from the Kyrie in the same Urdu as those leaflets, to the Gospel in the Spanish of both countries that had outstanding territorial disputes with the United Kingdom. That Gospel was read by a Mexican whose church had very little connection to the Church of England, having been founded in 1860 when dissident Catholic priests had secured a bishop from the American Episcopalians, who had themselves been constituted 75 years earlier due to treason against the Crown, and whose own Orders derived from the Scottish Episcopalians, notable for their persistent Jacobitism. As for Urdu, it was the parental language of my schoolmate who has since won a BAFTA. Over to you, Goodwin.

The Living Democratic Element

Chris Daw KC writes:

I first went to watch jury trials in the at Liverpool Crown Court after a rudimentary 1980s computer careers test informed me, with the kind of brutal confidence only primitive technology can muster, that I was fit for only two possible futures: the Bar, or stage and screen. Despite having no clue what it really entailed, I chose the first, though I can see the overlap. Criminal advocacy, at its best, is performance with a moral purpose. It is theatre, yes, but theatre with consequences measured in liberty, reputation and sometimes life itself.

I was hooked immediately. I spent most of my 17-year-old summer sitting in the public gallery in wonder: at the skill of the advocates, at the concentration of the juries, and at the extraordinary outcomes in cases where jurors disbelieved the police and believed defendants who, on paper, did not look especially promising. Many had difficult backgrounds. Some had defences which, at first glance, seemed improbable. Yet the jury listened. Really listened. And I realised, very early, how vital it is that some decisions are made not by the state, not by professionals who inhabit the system every day, but by ordinary citizens with no skin in the game, no axe to grind and no preconceptions about what they are about to decide.

That lesson has never left me. Thirty-nine years and hundreds of jury trials later, I have seen the same thing in every kind of case: the tiny, quiet case nobody reports and the huge, headline-making case with cameras outside; allegations of child sexual abuse, murder, serious organised crime, multi-million-pound fraud, money laundering and international drug trafficking on an industrial scale — think cocaine concealed in industrial equipment and wholesale quantities, straight off the ship from South America.

My trials have included a £533 million conspiracy to import high-purity cocaine, a £30 million money-laundering operation, and countless cases of commercial and tax fraud of every kind. I also defended in the Ryan Giggs case, in which a Manchester Crown Court jury could not reach verdicts. A retrial was later abandoned and not guilty verdicts were entered. I acted in the Hillsborough fresh inquests and subsequent criminal proceedings, widely portrayed as a “cover-up” case, where the inquests ran before a jury for over two years and my client in the later criminal trial was cleared on the judge’s direction. 

Few in the current debate have noted that, by removing the jury, not only does the system change the ultimate decision-maker but it removes an entire layer of protection from the defendant. At present, judges can filter out cases, which are unsustainable in law, with juries left to return verdicts on cases only where the judge declares a case to answer. A vital safeguard will be gone.

What all of those cases have in common is this: the jury is not a decorative flourish. It is not a quaint relic. It is the living democratic element in criminal justice. A jury brings not legal expertise but something just as important — collective judgment, common sense, life experience, scepticism, mercy, independence and the ability to test the state’s case against the reality of human behaviour. David Lammy’s own Lammy Review stressed that trust in impartial decisions rests not only on judicial independence but on the connection between courts and the communities they serve, and it cited research finding very similar jury conviction rates across ethnic groups, concluding that jury verdicts were one stage of the system where Black, Asian and minority ethnic groups did not face persistent disproportionality. 

That is why the present attack on jury trial matters so much. At the time of writing, the Courts and Tribunals Bill is in committee stage in the House of Commons. The Bill would remove the defendant’s right to elect Crown Court trial for all triable-either-way offences where magistrates accept jurisdiction; remove the need for a defendant’s consent before a Crown Court case is sent back down to the magistrates’ court; create a new Crown Court Bench Division in which triable-either-way cases likely to attract up to three years’ custody would be tried by a judge alone; introduce judge-only trials for certain lengthy and technical fraud cases; and replace the automatic right of appeal from the magistrates’ court to the Crown Court with a permission stage and issue-based appeal.

The government’s explanation is by now tediously familiar. It says the reforms are necessary to deliver “faster and fairer justice for victims”. It points to a Crown Court backlog of around 80,000 cases, with nearly 20,000 waiting over a year, including around 2,000 rape cases. It says this is a pragmatic response to rising demand, that investment alone is not enough, that jury trial will be “reserved” for the most serious cases, and that judges rather than defendants should “triage” where cases are heard — much as “experts” do in other public services. David Lammy told the Commons that juries would remain “the cornerstone” of the system, that only the threshold was changing, and that after the reforms about three quarters of Crown Court trials would still be heard by a jury.

I regard that explanation as lame because it is lame. The jury did not cause this crisis. The jury did not close courtrooms, allow buildings to rot, leave cells broken, fail to provide enough judges and staff, or produce endless delays in transporting prisoners to court. Even Sir Brian Leveson’s own overview says the most significant cause of the present mess is chronic underfunding at every step. The Bar Council says bluntly that juries have not caused the crisis and that the language of “modernisation” is a Trojan horse to hack away at a constitutional principle. An open letter to the Prime Minister, signed by a remarkable range of lawyers — including me — points instead to unused courtrooms, PECS failures, crumbling buildings and shortages of staff, judges and counsel. I have said the same thing publicly myself: the current chaos has “nothing to do with the 1000 year-old jury system”. 

Then there is the small matter of the evidence. The government’s own impact assessment says the measures begin to come into force only from the end of March 2028. It estimates that around 5,500 cases which would currently receive a jury trial will instead be kept in the magistrates’ courts, and around 4,000 further Crown Court cases will be heard by a judge alone, while about 10,000 cases will still be heard by a jury. The Institute for Government says the reforms would almost halve the number of jury trials while reducing total Crown Court time by less than 10%, and that judge-only trials themselves would save less than 2% of total court time if they are 20% quicker. The Bar Council’s written evidence says these are not “low-level” offences, that the change would affect under 2% of cases, and that even on the government’s own estimate it will make no difference to the backlog for many years, if at all. That is a ruinous constitutional price for a marginal and delayed managerial gain. 

And make no mistake: this is the thin end of the wedge. I have said publicly that once the government gets away with cutting jury trial by 50%, it will be on a “short and greasy slope” to the 95% cut originally contemplated. That is not paranoia. It is how constitutional retreat works. First, jury trial ceases to be a right and becomes a rationed resource. Then it becomes a question of administrative convenience. Then some future minister moves the threshold again. Leveson’s own earlier recommendation was to remove the right to elect only for offences carrying less than two years’ custody, yet the government has already gone further. Sir Geoffrey Cox put it perfectly in the Commons: once you say three years, why not four or five? Little by little, a hole is driven through the principle itself. 

There is also a deeper human point, and this matters every bit as much as the constitutional one. Some decisions simply require the judgment of the whole community. Cases involving allegations of violence, sexual behaviour, coercion, dishonesty or corrupt police conduct are rarely mechanical exercises. They turn on nuance, tone, context, class, culture, language, psychology and credibility. They involve the question not only “what happened?” but “what do we, as a society, make of what happened?” 

A single judge may be wise, diligent and fair. Many are. But one mind is still one mind. Twelve citizens bring twelve lives into the room. That plurality is not a weakness in the system; it is the safeguard. And at a time when wider research continues to find ethnic disparities elsewhere in criminal justice outcomes, it is perverse to weaken one part of the system where Lammy found no persistent disproportionality in verdicts.

I have said on LinkedIn that “we must fight for jury trials with everything we have got”, and I meant it. I have argued publicly that no human-designed system produces fairer or more respected verdicts than an English jury. I have likened the government’s plans to bulldozing Piccadilly Circus to build a bus station, and I stand by the point even if the metaphor is mischievous. Barristers should not be neutral about this. We are not hired merely to process cases through a state machine. We are part of the constitutional architecture of criminal justice. If we will not speak when the right to jury trial is being cut down in the name of efficiency, modernisation and victim-care rhetoric, then we will have failed not only our clients but the system itself. 

I still think about that 17-year-old in Liverpool Crown Court, watching jurors lean forward as a witness gave evidence, watching advocates fight over facts that would change somebody’s life, watching ordinary people perform their public duty with seriousness and care. What struck me then still strikes me now: juries are not an inconvenience to be managed out of existence. They are one of the few places where the public does not merely watch justice being done, but does it. Once you understand that, the present proposals do not look like reform. They look like surrender. 

Barristers need to take a stand on jury trials because, if we do not stand for them now, we may soon find that this ancient, historic and constitutional right has been whittled away to a memory — and that some of the most important decisions in a free society are no longer being made in the name of the public at all. A final thought – can you think of another public institution which commands near universal respect and confidence, amongst the voting public, as trial by jury? No, neither can I.

WEIRD Is Not Wonderful

There are those who rave about Ayn Rand, there are those who worship at the altar of Leo Strauss, there are those who still think that Samuel P. Huntington was onto something, and they will all be coked up together at Liz Truss’s British CPAC, to which her three immediate predecessors should be invited to explain why they had had her in the Cabinet. But then there are the ones that just never quite caught on, being too much even for those boys. One might say, too weird.

Many of the most clannish cultures, for good or ill, have been profoundly Catholic, while several of the most notable scientists, including Darwin and Einstein, have been married to their cousins. The Middle America in which the phenomenon of the nuclear family was first identified was aggressively anti-Catholic, a trend that is reasserting itself within the Trump coalition, and was quite open to cousin marriage, as may yet also reassert itself. See also Britain in its industrial and imperial heyday. And so on. Back in 2020, this was the initial response of a professional historian, Nicholas Guyatt:

Why did Europe play such an outsized role in human history? A generation ago, the geographer Jared Diamond offered an elegant answer in his book Guns, Germs and Steel: Europeans weren’t smarter than non-Europeans, but geography and natural resources propelled Europe’s development in particular directions. Harvard professor Joseph Henrich is a fan of Diamond but his new book takes a different approach. Henrich was trained as an anthropologist but now describes himself as a “cultural evolutionist”. In the same way that Darwin’s theory explains how life follows pathways of adaptation via natural selection, cultural evolution proposes that human cultures develop and transmit deep understandings and values across generations. There are many pathways of cultural evolution, Henrich contends, and no single human culture. To better understand the world and Europe’s influence on it, we need to recognise that European culture is, in Henrich’s key acronym, “weird”: western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic.

Henrich insists that “weird” values are culturally determined and specific rather than universal or natural. Specific doesn’t mean bad. As the book’s subtitle suggests, he credits the “firmware” of “weird” cultural evolution for many of the modern world’s core values: meritocracy, representative government, trust, innovation, even patience and restraint. These were the products not simply of Europe’s distinctive and highly unusual milieu, but of a narrow force many of us have forgotten: the prescriptions and hangups of the Christian church.

No historian would deny Christianity’s central role in the development of European society. But Henrich thinks that the church’s views on marriage and family life changed everything. He notes that Christianity was, from the middle ages at least, unusually hostile towards marriage between cousins. This produced a profound change in social organisation with sweeping effects on European culture. Kinship, a term that has always fascinated anthropologists, plays a key role in the book: it directs communities inwards, and makes them either apathetic or hostile towards those outside their particular clan.

Henrich argues that the church largely destroyed kinship within Europe between AD1000 and 1500, even as clan-based societies persisted across the rest of the planet. Within Europe, where prohibitions on cousin marriage forced people to marry beyond their families, “weird” culture became more receptive to strangers. Monasteries, universities, trading guilds, courts, stock markets, legislatures, coffee houses, newspapers – along with enterprise, trust and mobility – took root in the soil of “intergroup prosociality” created by the church’s edicts on marriage.Beyond Europe, non-“weird” people shared resources and a strong sense of local community but missed out on the forms of social dynamism and openness that supercharged Europe’s development.

Historians will find plenty to dispute here. Scholars of the medieval era will point out that the effects of the church’s “marriage and family programme” (the “MFP”, as Henrich inevitably terms it) were wildly uneven across time and space. Historians of the early modern era will note that the Protestant church was far less hostile to cousin marriage than its Catholic rival. (The Reformation received a crucial boost from Henry VIII’s determination to marry his former wife’s cousin.) Modern historians will argue that cousin marriage increased across many European societies in the 17th and 18th centuries before it was stigmatised again in the 19th century. They might also recall that, despite a consummately “weird” enthusiasm for innovation, both Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein married their first cousins. Historians of the world beyond Europe will find a thousand exceptions to Henrich’s confident stereotyping of non-“weird” societies as hopelessly retarded by kinship and its developmental dead-ends.

A casual reader may wonder how a book about the efflorescence of European culture could say next to nothing about racism, imperialism and environmental catastrophe – the undertow of individualism, market economics and representative government in Europe. “I’m not highlighting the very real and pervasive horrors of slavery, racism, plunder and genocide,” Henrich concedes in his final chapter. “There are plenty of books on those subjects.” But the omission is corrosive to his argument: not only because he presents “prosperity” and “innovation” rather than genocide and expropriation as the avatars of “weird” culture, but because Europeans failed to demonstrate “impersonal prosociality” when they ventured beyond Europe. If anything, empire’s violence and devastation suggests that the kinship thinking supposedly purged by Christianity re-emerged in Europeans’ new theories of race. White people were happy to dismiss the talent and futures of hundreds of millions of non-European people in the pursuit of financial gain, and to do so across centuries.

The Weirdest People seems grimly acclimatised to the darker aspects of our political present. Beyond Henrich’s claim that the world’s cultures developed on separate evolutionary pathways, an assertion that seems doggedly inattentive to the interpenetration of cultures and ideas across human history, he argues that “disparate societies” produce “a rich array of diverse cultural psychologies” marking out populations across generations, if not centuries. Deploying a battery of studies based on contemporary evidence – surveys of IBM employees in different countries, say, or the unpaid New York parking tickets of UN diplomats – Henrich suggests that corruption, impatience and even aggression are more common in non-“weird” cultures than in western society.

We shouldn’t blame non-“weird” individuals who fetishise revenge or indulge in nepotism, he implies: they’re burdened by centuries of kinship logic that sees little value in transparency and trust beyond one’s clan. Instead Henrich’s study chides western policymakers who take a unitary view of human nature when they promote democracy or the rule of law in the global south. Unless “weird” politicians and planners can reset the “firmware” of non-“weird” cultures, he warns, those societies can no more escape their cultural norms than we can ours.

I confess that when reading these pages I couldn’t help remembering that Donald Trump gave his son-in-law responsibility for Middle East peace, and that Boris Johnson has made his brother a lord. But cultural evolutionists trade in centuries and populations, so these distracting exceptions can presumably be drowned in an ocean of data.

What about non-European people who have settled in “weird” societies? Across virtually every sphere of human knowledge over the centuries, immigrants have carried ideas and practices that have fertilised cross-cultural thinking. This process seems mostly invisible to Henrich. Declining the opportunity to discuss the forms of syncretism and assimilation that define immigrant experience, he offers (tenuous) evidence that non-“weird” thinking endures among migrants across continents and generations. Citing high rates of cousin marriage among second-generation Pakistani immigrants to Britain, and lower levels of political activism among second-generation immigrants of colour across Europe, Henrich concludes that even growing up in a “weird” society can’t expunge the “dark matter” of one’s cultural-psychological lineage.

It was “weird” intellectuals who crafted the pseudo-science of race in the 18th century, and who spliced it with evolutionary theories to create new arguments about civilisation and white supremacy in the 19th. Henrich might wince at the suggestion that The Weirdest People in the World endorses social Darwinism, but in its emphasis on the supposedly discrete nature of culture and on the virtues of “weird” thinking and progress it comes uncomfortably close to doing just that.

And last year, once the thesis had had a chance to bed in, this was the verdict of postliberal royalty, Sebastian Milbank:

Are you WEIRD? If you have a Bachelor’s degree, speak English, and only see your cousins at Christmas, the answer is almost certainly yes, or so goes an argument forwarded by Joseph Henrich, author of The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. 

WEIRD stands for “Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic” and is used to describe a particular psychological “template” typical of modern Westerners. Drawing on historical and psychological research, Henrich argues that unlike most people in the world and premodernity, we are “highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist and analytical. We focus on ourselves — our attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations — over our relationships and social roles”.

A familiar, accurate and, to my eyes, not especially flattering portrait of modern Western man, archetypally plonked in front of the TV in his pants, scrolling through his phone and waiting for his pizza to arrive. But according to Henrich, these traits are the key to Western exceptionalism, the source of the scientific and industrial revolutions, not to mention modern democracy and human rights.

His bold thesis is that WEIRD psychology emerged in the middle ages, driven by the Catholic Church’s suppression of clannish kinship networks, and the emergence of nuclear families and a mobile workforce in Western Europe. These high trust societies with weaker family bonds led to greater innovation, equality before the law, meritocracy and democratic decision-making. Not only does the WEIRD hypothesis seem to unlock the secret of Western success, it also appears to explain the difficulties experienced by many non-Western, non-WEIRD societies in adopting modern institutions. Whereas WEIRD Westerners are trusting and non-conformist, much of the Global South remains deferential to family and tradition, but untrusting of strangers and abstract institutions. 

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Published in 2020, the book has come at just the right time to explain everything from the failure of the War on Terror to the difficulties of integrating asylum seekers. It’s quickly been seized on by a number of intellectual tendencies as a way of articulating the distinctiveness of the West, but outside of the conservative “family, faith and flag” narrative.

For libertarians and classical liberals, increasingly a disaffected wing of the right, suspicious of Islam, and angry at the “censorious left”, it’s a comforting narrative. It offers a conservative realism about the likelihood of rapid global democratisation and local integration of migrants, combined with an ultimate optimism about the triumph of Western ideas and institutions.

Yet it’s also gained traction amongst more trenchant nationalists and ethno-nationalists. Some, Le Pen style, have pivoted to defining liberalism as a distinct “national” cultural tradition peculiar to Western countries, one that must be defended by sometimes illiberal means. Others, going still further, see WEIRD psychology as aligned with racial phenotypes, a model of society that can only be enjoyed by the genetically gifted, a perspective Henrich himself rejects.

All of this reflects the strange ferment of the contemporary populist right, in which an increasingly civilisational sense is combined with an inability to agree on how Western civilisation is to be defined. All of this is happening at a time of radical globalisation, in which Silicon Valley has an outsize role in shaping public discourse online, both directly and indirectly. The populist right is caught between this civilisational instinct, which directs it to a more symbolic and spiritual reality, and an impulse towards an amoral, hard-edged materialism and rationalism.

The payout of this contradiction is typically a nostalgia for yesterday’s liberalism, and a patriotism on behalf of decadence. Western individualism and libertinism are recast as a civilisational strength by this rationalist Right, which seeks to rigorously patrol the walls of our permissive paradise.

This is reflective of a new demographic of right-winger. Alienated from a progressive-dominated academy, especially in the humanities, many of them are STEM graduates, and a number of them work in the valley. They are young men typically aged 20–40. Their earnings vary, but many are in professional jobs, yet struggle to save, buy a house or get a girlfriend. They are likely to be active online. They are self-educated, especially in history, literature and philosophy. They listen to podcasts, they read books, almost all of it popular non-fiction.

Their political instincts vary widely from freewheeling libertarianism, all the way to Trumpian or Faragian populism. They’re attracted to material and genetic explanations for criminality and life chances and technological solutions to climate change. They are generally free speech absolutists, and even those who are relatively centrist consume irreverent, offensive and politically incorrect content.

Henrich is of an earlier generation, but he’s exactly the kind of author that appeals to the rationalist right. He writes the sort of ambitious global narratives that historians in the academy disdain, and combines a degree in anthropology with one in engineering. The bias towards mechanistic modes of thinking is everywhere in the book. The “circuitry” of our brains has been “rewired”. When discussing religion Henrich explains that “cultural evolution will seek out back doors in our minds by locating glitches in our psychological firewalls”. Our belief systems are “cognitive bugs” which can be adapted into “potent social technologies”.

It shouldn’t take too much deep reflection to see the inherent limitations and problems that pertain to describing a biological organ (a human brain) as a faultily wired circuit board. Nor should we single out Henrich here.

There is a general cultural forgetting of the West’s actual intellectual tradition. An often arrogant, inward-looking and self-serving academic class are terrible evangelists for it, using their superior education to obfuscate their subject areas and deconstruct inherited wisdom. Meanwhile rationalist writers, often acting with both admirable humility and ambition, are infinitely more appealing, even though their approach is often hopelessly amateurish and partial.

What is being missed out? Henrich is a gifted scholar, and he makes powerful, even intuitive use of psychological research. But it is obvious he has no significant grasp of philosophy or intellectual history, and fails to appreciate its significance. Embracing evolutionary psychology, he de-emphasises agency, posing cultural change as the product of random features passing through a Darwinian filter. According to Henrich, no Western society “set out” to be WEIRD; rather, by an accident of history, organisations and cultures with WEIRD traits emerge, and outcompete groups that lack them.

As a result, the conscious evolution of ideas is largely ignored, along with the full range of perspectives on “WEIRD” ideas. Every hoary progressive myth of the 19th century, from Weber’s Protestant work ethic to the Whig view of history is resurrected, without any awareness of why they were killed off in the first place. The popularity of these “naive” narrative works is a symptom of a culture that lacks a core canon of knowledge, and fails to produce well-rounded thinkers.

For anyone with a serious grasp of medieval or early modern history, the idea that Western society was then defined by “individualism” and hostility to inherited tradition comes as a considerable surprise. Again, one gets the sense of what Henrich is getting at — that a distinct psychology with more emphasis on the individual and willingness to embrace new ideas is emerging — but as with the mechanistic brain, false ideas are being imported by using imprecise, poorly chosen terms.

The power of the WEIRD hypothesis is that it’s undoubtedly picking up on something real. The psychological research is impressive. The argument that Western culture has a unique psychology, not universalisable to every group, is an important insight. And the idea that this distinctiveness can be traced to the Middle Ages and Latin Christendom is certainly persuasive. But the gaps, once you notice them, are glaring.

Forget, for a moment, the inadequacy of “individualism”, however nascent, as an explanation of 14th or 17th century European difference. Let’s consider an unquestionably modern European example. 20th century Europeans should, by his argument, be very WEIRD indeed, yet much of the early 20th century was consumed by the rise of radically collectivist states, from the Soviet Union to Nazi Germany.

In the opening pages of The Weirdest People in the World, Henrich not only singles out Germany, but analyses literacy rates based on historic Protestant affiliation, showing an extremely strong correlation. One could just as easily link electoral support for the Nazi party with those same patterns of Protestant populations. Why did the WEIRD Lutherans flock to a movement that suspended all individual rights and sought to exterminate the stranger, whilst “clannish” German Catholics were more likely to vote for democracy and toleration?

Why, for that matter do groups at the extreme end of a shift towards individualism end up, across Europe, supporting totalitarian communist or fascist parties and governments?

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It’s a mystery that Henrich never addresses, and indeed there is a great deal about the modern world that radically complicates his thesis. The mores of our contemporary English-speaking world (individualism, consumerism and so on), and its signal achievements (economic growth, democracy, toleration, etc.) are assumed as the pinnacle of evolutionary history, and are imposed retrospectively on radically different historical societies.

What he fails to consider is that radical individualism might be, in historical terms, an extremely recent development, really only emerging in the 1960s, and reaching its peak within the past two decades. Likewise, for all his thorough research in many areas, there is much missing when it comes to recent psychological developments.

Whilst he correctly identifies the uniqueness of Western voluntary associations, and the unusually high levels of trust in Western societies, he is entirely unable to account for both of these trends going into reverse over past decades. In Britain, the number of young adults with one or fewer close friends went from 7 per cent to almost 20 per cent between 2012 and 2021, a trend repeated in America.

Trust in institutions has declined across the West for decades, and the freedom of children to roam and play — an excellent proxy for interpersonal trust — has collapsed in the same period. Shrinking levels of criminality, another supposed unique feature of WEIRD cultures, went into reverse in America during the 1960s to 1980s, at the peak of the dissolution of traditional norms.

All of this points to what the rationalist Right is missing — what really makes us WEIRD, historically, is not individualism, but corporatism. The great historic shift from incestuous clannishness to nuclear families and the rule of law involved not a narrowing of the mental horizon to individual interest, but rather a radical expansion of affections and duties.

Henrich is contradictory on this point, constantly stressing the “declining importance of relationships”, whilst celebrating the proliferation of voluntary associations. The contradiction emerges because of his attempt to reconcile modern individualism with the historically successful psychology of the West. He misses the obvious, or perhaps just the unthinkable.

What Henrich and his followers are picking up on is an increasingly hobbled, psychologically crippled West, working with only half of its brain, out of touch with its own identity. The promise of perpetual prosperity and security, linked by a wonderfully closed circuit to our self-indulgent individualism, is a lie already collapsing all around us.

The true WEIRDness of the West rests not in a narrow individualist mindset — a kind of civilisational autism — but rather in our genius for reconciling holistic and analytic, group and individual, tradition and novelty. From the ancient polis, in which individual glory was reconciled with civic belonging, to the Christian humanism that located the dignity of man in self-sacrificial love, our civilisation achieved an equilibrium between the extremes of collectivism and individualism.

When that balance is lost, the dream of the Christian West, with its extraordinary material power and massive social organisation, can fast become a nightmare, whether that’s the horrors of totalitarianism or the soul-crushing isolation of contemporary atomisation. If the rationalist right want to be truly civilisational thinkers, they must accept that the West today is not weirdly wonderful, but grotesquely disfigured.

To Improve Social Cohesion?

Social solidarity is an expression of personal responsibility, personal responsibility is protected by social solidarity, international solidarity is an expression of national sovereignty, and national sovereignty is protected by international solidarity. Equality and diversity must include economic equality and class diversity, regional equality and regional diversity, the equal sovereignty of diverse states, and equal respect for diverse opinions within a framework of free speech and other civil liberties, including due process of law with the presumption of innocence, requiring that conviction be beyond reasonable doubt. Eradicating cousin marriage is not inimical to any of this, but it is hardly near the top of the list of priorities. Kemi Badenoch, however, would not like the things that were.

Cousin marriage is unconditionally legal in 18 of the United States plus the District of Columbia, and conditionally legal in a further six. Proponents of a ban on it here should ask themselves why there was not one already. There did used to be. Until the Reformation, the Late Roman ban on marriage to the fourth degree of consanguinity had obtained, extended to affinity because in marriage, “the two shall become one flesh”. Catholic Canon Law has therefore always banned cousin marriage, at one time to the seventh degree, although with possibilities of dispensation since the ban was not in the Bible. Such dispensations did the Hapsburgs no good.

The legality of marriages between first cousins is a product of the Reformation. Its prevalence until the First World War, and as recently as that, was a badge of Protestant honour, since Henry VIII had legalised it when he had wanted to marry Catherine Howard, who was Anne Boleyn’s first cousin, and since although William and Mary never had children, the intention had been that they would, and they were first cousins whose marriage would not ordinarily have been possible in the Catholic Church. Does the Orange Order now wish to ban a marriage such as William of Orange’s? Would the four stripes of Northern Irish Unionist in the House of Commons vote for that ban?

This seems to be a Two Cultures thing. Although Charles and Emma Darwin were first cousins who had 10 children, and although Albert and Elsa Einstein were both maternal first cousins and paternal second cousins such that her maiden name was Einstein, the mere thought of this practice is profoundly shocking to scientists. But to people formed by the study of literature and history, then, while that is where it belongs, that is where you will find it routinely. Mainstream British society was educated out of it, and not very long ago, so that can obviously be done. South Asians are hardly unreceptive to education. Between 1979 and 1981, the makers and viewers of To the Manor Born took it as read that Audrey fforbes-Hamilton’s late husband had been her cousin. Although Coronation Street does not, both Emmerdale and EastEnders still feature such arrangements between white characters whose families were supposed to have lived in Emmerdale or Walford since time out of mind, and that seems to raise no eyebrows.

Anglo-Saxons and Scotch-Irish still regularly marry their first cousins in several of the parts of the United States that were most likely to vote for Donald Trump, and they did so as a matter of course into the very recent past. But if the argument is that this was something that certain other ethnic groups did, then it is probably better to treat it as a health education matter rather than a criminal one. After all, that was what worked with everyone else. Nineteenth-century novels are full of marriages between first cousins as the most normal thing in the world, and Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were first cousins. By descent from that marriage, the King’s parents were third cousins, while they were also second cousins once removed through a different line. But the King is a last hurrah of that sort of thing. His mother was one of the least inbred monarchs ever, and his son and grandson are not at all inbred. Educate people, and it will mostly or entirely die out. That worked with everyone else. Even the Royal Family.

Yet since the intention would apparently be to prevent genetic defects, which is not the only reason to oppose cousin marriage, then it would be pointless without the criminalisation of sex between first cousins. So be it, but that seems highly unlikely, since we have already raised the age of marriage to two years above the age of consent, a literally preposterous arrangement. Pity poor Imam Ashraf Osmani of Northampton, who in January was handed a suspended sentence of 15 weeks’ imprisonment for having performed a nikah, which has no legal status whatever, so that two 16-year-olds could have a perfectly lawful sexual relationship without sinning. The second time as farce.

Something similar applies to polygamy. As you could marry your cousin my nikah, with no legal standing, and the two of you could then have children perfectly legally as you could have done anyway, so you can take three more wives alongside your legal one by nikah, with no legal standing, and have children with all of them. Or you could take all four wives by nikah alone. In fact, any man can have children with four different women simultaneously if they will let him. Doing so with two, often in arrangements that lasted decades, has never been especially uncommon. Whatever else it may be, it is certainly not un-British.

Right To Occupy?

God loves a trier, and Andrew Rosindell was nothing if not trying when he sought to retain the use of his constituency office, the property of Romford Conservative Association. Today, the High Court has not only refused him an injunction, but also ordered him to pay £23,000 in his former party’s legal costs, since upon his defection to Reform UK, he “ought to have realised that he had surrendered his right to occupy” Margaret Thatcher House. Margaret Thatcher House?

The only organisation that ever succeeded in getting rid of Thatcher was the Conservative Party. If it loved her in life as much as it loves in her death, then it had a very, very, very strange way of showing it. In her memoirs, the extremely bitter chapter on the Poll Tax makes it clear that she laboured under no delusion that she had been removed because of “Europe”. That was the cover story, but “Europe” had not been the reason why scores of Conservative MPs had been on course to lose their seats. The content, rather than the tone, of that policy did not change under her successor. By contrast, the Poll Tax was abolished completely, with a reversion in all but name to the previous system of domestic rates. The Conservatives then unexpectedly won the General Election of 1992, when Thatcher retired from the House of Commons.

Thatcher’s humble origins are greatly exaggerated. She was the daughter of a major local businessman and politician who ran most of the committees and charities for miles around. Even the people who love her can see why the people who hate her do so; they just do not agree. But why the people who love her do so is, in their own terms, a complete mystery. She gave Britain the Single European Act, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the Exchange Rate Mechanism, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, the Children Act, the replacement of O-levels with GCSEs, the destruction of the economic basis of paternal authority in the stockades of male employment, the massive increase in benefit dependency, the rise of Political Correctness, the general moral chaos of the 1980s, the legalisation of abortion up to birth for “severe fetal abnormality” that did not have to be specified, the fight against Victoria Gillick, and that is just the start. Her only Commons defeat was when she tried to make Sunday just another shopping day. The basis of the lockdowns was the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984. Who was the Prime Minister in 1984? For having publicly set fire to the Quran, Martin Frost and Hamit Coskun were both charged under section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986. Who was the Prime Minister in 1986? Three years later, Thatcher’s supporters wanted to use that provision against those who had publicly set fire to The Satanic Verses.

The stockades of working-class male employment were destroyed, and a new ruling elite of middle-class women funded and empowered by the State was created, by the politician who proclaimed the self-made man and the self-made woman, a proclamation of which the inexorable logic is gender self-identification. Just as Thatcher emerged in the Britain of everything from Danny La Rue and Dick Emery to David Bowie and The Rocky Horror Show, so a comparable figure, emerging in the Britain of the 2020s, would be assumed to be a transwoman. Thatcher has already been played by a drag queen at least once on British television, and specifically on Channel 4, which she created, meaning that one of her most abiding legacies is that Britain has two state broadcasters, one of which nevertheless carries advertisements. Thatcherism in a nutshell, as has always been clear from the output.

Was Thatcher “the Iron Lady” when, in early 1981, her initial pit closure programme was abandoned within two days of a walkout by the miners? Was she “the Iron Lady” when she had Nicholas Ridley negotiate a transfer of sovereignty over the Falkland Islands to Argentina, to be followed by a leaseback arrangement, until the Islanders, the Labour Party and Conservative backbenchers forced her to back down? Was she “the Iron Lady” when, within a few months of election on clear commitments with regard to Rhodesia, she simply abandoned them at the Commonwealth Conference in Lusaka? Was she “the Iron Lady” when, having claimed that Britain would never give up Hong Kong, she took barely 24 hours to return to Planet Earth by effecting a complete U-turn? Was she “the Iron Lady” when she took just as little time to move from public opposition to public support of Spanish accession to the Western European Union?

In the Budget of December 1976, Denis Healey and Jim Callaghan had delighted Thatcher by blindsiding the critics of monetarism on the Conservative benches, but was she “the Iron Lady” when she gave up monetarism completely during her second term? Thatcher’s continuous contact with the IRA, universally assumed at the time, has long since been confirmed. Four of the Hunger Strikers’ Five Demands were granted on 6 October 1981, and by 1983 even the right not to do prison work had been conceded. The Lady was as Iron about that as she was about most other things, namely not at all.

Thatcher was, though, true to her assurance in 1979 and in 1983 that, although until 1985 the Ulster Unionist Party remained affiliated to the National Union of Conservative and Unionist Associations, there would be no return to office for Enoch Powell. But then, when told that Thatcher professed to have been influenced by his books on economics, Powell replied that, “She couldn’t have understood them, then.” He baffled her by telling her that he would have fought in the Second World War even if Britain had had a Communist Government. He would still have fought for his country. With no Tory roots, that was beyond her. With deep Liberal roots, she thought that wars were about “values”. That wider conversation was about what was then the recent Falklands War. While Powell had supported it on his own principles, Thatcher had seen it as an example of her dictum that, “If I send British troops abroad, it will be to defend our values.” Many years later, when asked her greatest achievement, she replied, “New Labour.” Quite. Thatcher has been named as her political heroine by Shabana Mahmood, who would issue us all with digital ID, and who would make people who had lived here for at least 10 years earn indefinite leave to remain by performing both paid and unpaid work to her satisfaction.

In 1981, Thatcher did impose an absolute ban on all government work for Andersen in view of its role in the DeLorean fraud, a ban that lasted until the General Election of 1997, when Patricia Hewitt was made Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, having only just entered Parliament from her position as Head of Research at Andersen Consulting. And in 1988, Thatcher and Nigel Lawson did correct the taxation of wealth at a lower rate than earnings until, in 1998, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown put the clock back to the Chancellor of the Exchequer who had gone on, as First Lord of the Treasury, to introduce monetarism to Britain and vice versa. But if those moves made Thatcher a better social democrat than New Labour, then their reversal made New Labour better Thatcherites than Thatcher or even Lawson.

The middle classes were transformed from people like Thatcher’s father into people like her son. She told us, and she really did, that “there is no such thing as society”, in which case there cannot be any such thing as the society that is the family, or the society that is the nation. Even more damagingly, and that is quite a feat, she endorsed the vugar illiteracy that the currency-issuing State had no money of its own, and could therefore “run out of other people’s money”. All in all, she turned Britain into the country that Marxists had always said that it was, even though before her, it never had been. Specifically, Thatcher sold off national assets at obscenely undervalued prices, while subjecting the rest of the public sector, fully 40 per cent of the British economy, to an unprecedented level of central dirigisme.

Thatcher continued public subsidies to private schools, to agriculture, to nuclear power, and to mortgage-holders. Without those public subsidies, the fourth would hardly have existed, and the other three, then as now, would not have existed at all. So much for “You can’t buck the market”. You can now, as you could then, and as she did then. The issue is not whether private schooling, agriculture, nuclear power, or mortgage-holding is a good or a bad thing in itself. The issue is whether “Thatcherism” was compatible with their continuation by means of “market-bucking” public subsidies. It simply was not, and is not.

Thatcher’s assault on council housing created the Housing Benefit racket, and it used the gigantic gifting of capital assets by the State to enable the beneficiaries to enter the property market ahead of private tenants, or of people still living at home, who in either case had saved for their deposits. What, exactly, was or is conservative or Tory about that? Or about moving in the characters from Shameless either alongside, or even in place of, the respectable working class?

It is thanks to Thatcher that the Conservatives have been the party of Net Zero for 40 years. Svante Arrhenius first theorised about anthropogenic global warming in 1896, and Thatcher was briefed about it by Sir Crispin Tickell, the then Deputy Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs at the Foreign Office. Thatcher always credited Tickell with having convinced her, leading to her speech on the subject to the Royal Society in 27 September 1988, the point at which the agenda of his 1977 Climatic Change and World Affairs entered the political mainstream. Tickell’s briefing of Thatcher was in 1984, tellingly the year that the Miners’ Strike began.

Thatcher began to blather on about environmentalism as a means of Socialist control once she had the dementia that also turned her into a born again Eurosceptic, but she was very Green indeed as Prime Minister, shocking first the Royal Society, and then the United Nations General Assembly, with her passion on the subject. By the time of her speech to the UN on 8 November 1989, she had made Tickell the British Ambassador to it, and the United Kingdom’s Permanent Representative on its Security Council. Boris Johnson described her destruction of the coal industry as “a big early start” towards Net Zero. Her milk-snatching is now held up as a pioneering strike against the wicked dairy industry, as I had been predicting for many years.

In 1979, Thatcher had not initially wanted to meet Menachem Begin in London, since her generation remembered what he was, and afterwards she expressed her regret at not having stuck to her guns. In 1980, she signed the Venice Declaration of nine European countries against Israeli settlements on the West Bank. In 1981, she denounced the Israeli bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, calling it illegal. In 1982, she responded to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon by imposing an arms embargo on Israel that remained in force until 1994; when Begin wrote to ask her to reconsider, then she did not even reply. In 1988, she expelled two Israeli diplomats and closed the London Mossad station when one of its double agents had been convicted of terrorism in Britain and when that station had been caught for a second time forging British passports, a practice that was to resurface, with similar but notably less severe consequences, in 2010; no Israeli diplomat had ever before been deported from a friendly state.

While all of that was to her credit, that would not be the view of her flamekeepers today, any more than they would approve of her attitude when visiting Kiev in June 1990, when she said that Britain would no more open an embassy in Ukraine than in California or Quebec. When the Soviet Union did collapse anyway, then she ludicrously pretended to have brought it down merely because she had happened to be in office at the time. But she did make a difference internationally where it was possible to do so, by providing aid and succour to Augusto Pinochet’s Chile and to apartheid South Africa, and by refusing to recognize either the Muzorewa-Smith Government or Joshua Nkomo, thereby paving the way for Robert Mugabe. Known as “the Peking Plotter”, she never saw a Maoist whom she did not like, from Mugabe, to Nicolae Ceaușescu, to Pol Pot. She even sent the SAS to train the Khmer Rouge, putting her in the same boat as Noam Chomsky, but making her worse, since he had no power to deploy Special Forces.

And it was Thatcher who issued what amounted to the open invitation to Argentina, armed by Begin’s Israel, to invade the Falkland Islands, followed by the starved Royal Navy’s having to behave as if the hopelessly out-of-her-depth Prime Minister did not exist, a sort of coup without which those Islands would be Argentine to this day. Until the eve of the invasion, Thatcher had been about to sell the ships that then had to be deployed. At a bargain basement price. To Argentina.

Neoliberalism In A Compostable Jacket

An interview with Paul Ehrlich in Playboy is a tainted source to rank with Henry VIII, and if any of Jeffrey Epstein, Peter Thiel and Noam Chomsky might vote or have voted for a party, then it is an Epstein Class party. Remember that as you read Paul Knaggs:

How much is a radical reputation worth when it refuses to touch the levers of ownership? We are often told that the Green Party of England and Wales represents the last bastion of principled, transformative politics in an era of stultifying centrism. Their Leader, Zack Polanski, moves through the media with the ease of a man who believes his own press releases, speaking of wealth taxes and a “fairer” economy. Yet, when one peels back the organic, hand-knitted layers, the core is not Green; it is the same cold, grey steel of the market.

The central contradiction of modern Green politics was laid bare at their recent party conference. While the country shivers under the extortionate weight of privatised energy bills, the Green membership voted against the nationalisation of the energy industry. It is a staggering admission. They wish to save the planet, but they are terrified of inconveniencing the speculators who currently own it.

That single decision tells you more about the party’s economic philosophy than a hundred conference speeches.

Nationalising Energy

Energy is the backbone of any economy. Control energy, and you control industry; control industry, and you control wages, growth, and regional development. Lose control of energy, and you surrender your economy to markets, speculators, and foreign shocks.

Britain today is a perfect example. We are more exposed to global price swings than most developed countries because we surrendered energy security to the market. The current conflict in Iran is a reminder that energy policy is not just about climate targets or tariffs on bills; it is about national resilience, economic stability, and political independence.

Every serious socialist movement in history understood that energy is not just another industry; it is the foundation of the entire economy. The Attlee government nationalised coal, rail, steel, and energy because it understood that without control of infrastructure, there is no economic democracy.

Norway built a state energy company and turned oil wealth into a sovereign wealth fund worth over a trillion dollars. France nationalised EDF and created one of the cheapest and most stable electricity systems in Europe.

These were not symbolic policies; they were structural changes that shifted power from markets to the public. So when a party that calls itself radical votes against public ownership of energy, we should be honest about what that means. For those who claim the Greens offer the best hope for socialism, understand this clearly: that is not socialism. That is market environmentalism.

Of course, energy nationalisation comes at a cost. Buying back infrastructure, compensating shareholders, and rebuilding a publicly run system is not cheap. But the real question is not how much nationalisation costs; it is whether we can afford not to do it. The cost of this so-called free market has already been enormous: runaway inflation driven by energy prices, billions in subsidies flowing to private energy firms, collapsing industrial competitiveness, and oligarch-style profiteering during a cost-of-living crisis.

We are already paying for privatisation every single month on our energy bills. Nationalisation is not the expensive option; it is the cheaper option in the long run. The free market in energy has not produced efficiency or security, only higher prices and private monopolies with guaranteed profits.

The Myth of Radicalism

To understand the Green Party, first look at what they do, not what they promise. In his recent interviews, Polanski outlines a vision that includes rejoining the European Union, a project fundamentally built on the four freedoms of capital, labour, goods, and services. It is a neoliberal framework designed to prevent the very state intervention required for a true socialist transition.

By tying their mast to the EU and rejecting the public ownership of energy, the Greens have signalled their true identity. They are not a party of structural reform; they are a party of administrative adjustment. They want the status quo, but with more cycle lanes and a slightly higher tax bracket for the wealthy. They offer the illusion of change without the discomfort of a class struggle.

The Energy Betrayal

The refusal to back nationalisation is the “smoking gun” of their neoliberal orientation. One cannot solve a climate crisis through the same market mechanisms that created it. Private energy firms are legally bound to prioritise shareholder dividends over the public good or environmental preservation.

By opting for a “Left-ish” posture while maintaining the sanctity of private property in the energy sector, Polanski and his peers are engaging in a form of political theatre. They are providing a “safe” outlet for the disillusioned voter, ensuring that even the most fervent environmental anxiety is channelled back into the safety of the capitalist consensus.

The Counterargument: A Question of Pragmatism?

The Greens would argue that they are being “pragmatic” or that “community energy” is a more democratic alternative to state-run monoliths. This is a seductive but hollow defence. Community projects, while noble, cannot provide the massive, coordinated infrastructure overhaul required to decarbonise a G7 nation.

Without state ownership, “community energy” simply becomes a series of fragmented niche markets operating within a wider privatised grid. It avoids the central question of power: who controls the heights of the economy? The Green answer, it seems, is anyone but the public.

The Silent Consensus

Ultimately, Zack Polanski’s Greens represent a sophisticated version of the status quo. They are the “polite” face of the neoliberal order, designed for those who find the Tories distasteful and Labour uninspiring, but who are not yet ready to demand a total redistribution of power.

We are faced with a party that wants to paint the fence green while the house is structurally unsound. They speak of a wealth tax, yet they refuse to seize the very assets that generate that wealth. They are a party of the middle class, by the middle class, for the middle class; offering a conscience-clearing vote that guarantees nothing will actually change for the working man in the North or the Midlands.

If you want to save the environment, you must first break the power of the markets. The Greens have shown us, quite clearly, that they have no intention of picking up the hammer.

The Green Party: a luxury boutique for radical aesthetics, but the same old management in the back office.

These Are People’s Lives

Charles Hymas writes:

Women will be put at greater risk of domestic violence by David Lammy’s plans to scale back jury trials, the head of the country’s solicitors has warned.

Under the Justice Secretary’s reforms, defendants will lose their right to elect a jury trial and will instead be tried by magistrates or a judge-only court if they are likely to be sentenced to a term of under three years in prison.

In an interview with The Telegraph, Richard Atkinson, the president of The Law Society, said Mr Lammy’s plans would lead to longer delays in magistrates’ courts as they took over cases that would previously have gone to the Crown Court for jury trials.

He said victims and defendants in magistrates’ courts were already facing delays of more than a year because of record backlogs of nearly 380,000 cases in England and Wales. But he warned these could easily rise to four or five years under the reforms, which will require magistrates to undertake thousands more trials each year.

Mr Atkinson, a practising solicitor in Kent, said the cases most likely to be taken over by magistrates would be more serious assaults, of which a large proportion relates to domestic violence. These were also cases with high “attrition” rates, in which vulnerable victims, anxious about going to court, withdrew from prosecutions, he said.

“They will be your more serious cases of coercive and controlling behaviour, of stalking, of serious harassment. These are very vulnerable victims whose cases are known to have very high attrition rates,” said Mr Atkinson, whose society represents more than 200,000 solicitors.

“I speak to the police quite a lot. Their victim care units and witness care units repeatedly report that delay leads to withdrawal, particularly in domestic violence cases.

“So you have a very vulnerable cohort that is being effectively threatened by this policy, with even longer delays in their cases coming before the court.

“Tragically, and I say this as a defence lawyer, but also as a human being, we know this attrition rate will see some of those cases go on to suffer more serious violence because the perpetrator wasn’t dealt with and their offending wasn’t addressed when it was at a lower level.

“These aren’t merely academic discussions around numbers. These are people’s lives. These potentially have really serious consequences.”

Ministers claim the changes will reduce record backlogs of more than 80,000 Crown Court cases, which would otherwise rise to 200,000 by 2035, according to an independently audited study by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ). It projects the reforms will cut the backlogs to 50,000 by 2035 by speeding up justice.

However, the Law Society’s own analysis and other research by the Institute for Government (IfG) disputes the MoJ’s modelling – and particularly a projection that magistrates could clear cases far more quickly than Crown Courts. The forecast is that magistrates could clear 27,000 days of Crown Court work in just 8,500 days.

But Mr Atkinson said this was predicated on magistrates completing trials in four hours and sentencing hearings in half an hour, figures that even now are disputed as realistic. The forecasts were also over-optimistic as the cases transferred down to magistrates in the reforms would be more complex, he said.

“The assumption that it is going to take four hours for a case that is now being retained that previously had gone to the Crown Court just doesn’t match with logic or experience. It’s very alarming if, in fact, their numbers are significantly out,” he said.

The consequences, Mr Atkinson said, would be continued delays in the Crown Court but, more worryingly, increased delays in magistrates’ courts. “Those cases that are going into the magistrates’ court will make the delays there as long, if not longer, than the worst delays in the Crown Court,” he said.

Mr Lammy is facing a rebellion by more than 60 Labour MPs who are demanding concessions over the plans.

Mr Atkinson said he would back a compromise mooted by lead rebel MP Karl Turner for a pilot of an intermediate court with a judge and two lay magistrates, instead of the judge-only court plan.

“It’s not ideal, but if it were to be the way in which it brings down the backlogs so that people get justice in time, then we could probably live with that, but a pilot must show us it works and it must have a lay element to it,” he said.

He said the current plans to deny jury trials to thousands of defendants were unfair, particularly with the three-year prison sentence limit. It would mean that a professional person with no previous criminal record facing an allegation of dishonesty, with everything to lose, would not get a jury trial, while a career criminal would.

“So the heavily-convicted person gets the gold standard jury, and the person who’s never been in trouble before and for whom conviction would be utterly devastating doesn’t. That can’t be right as a way of denying people justice,” he said.

Louis Goss writes:

A leading barrister who quit in protest against David Lammy’s jury trials overhaul has accused the Justice Secretary of exploiting the pain of rape victims to force his changes through Parliament.

Flora Page KC, who represented victims of the Post Office scandal, said she was incensed at Mr Lammy’s “tyrannical” plans for jury-free trials after watching him use “the pain of victims” to try to force through his measures.

During a parliamentary debate this month, Mr Lammy referred to a rape victim, called Katie, who waited seven years for a Crown Court trial. Mr Lammy argued that scrapping jury trials for most cases would help reduce the court backlogs and help “thousands of victims ... move on with their lives”.

However, Ms Page said Mr Lammy’s “manipulative” use of “people’s pain” to support his measures was outrageous – prompting her to quit her role on a powerful legal watchdog this month in protest.

“Once I watched it unfold and [Mr Lammy] and Sarah Sackman, his junior minister, started exploiting the very brave women who’d come to sit in the public gallery – rape victims – exploiting their stories ... I just thought, this is not something that I can silently watch,” said Ms Page.

“I’ve always believed in jury trials as the right way to try criminal cases because it’s the best way to bring the people of this country into the criminal justice system and make sure that criminal justice is reflective of what society wants.

“It was a surprise, frankly, when David Lammy and his department announced that they were going to make incursions into jury trial because it wasn’t in their manifesto and it wasn’t something that they even consulted on.”

“I just thought, I can’t stay silent. I can’t be part of working with a ministry that’s doing something that’s so damaging to the rule of law.”

Mr Lammy’s plans, which are currently going through Parliament, would remove jury trials for all but the most serious cases. It would mean only those facing more than three years’ imprisonment would have the right to defend themselves in front of their peers.

He has claimed the overhaul will help cut the record backlog of more than 80,000 cases currently waiting to be heard in Britain’s Crown Courts so that victims can have their cases heard more quickly.

However, Ms Page claimed plans had “nothing to do” with the backlog, and were instead driven by a belief that “everything must be controlled from the centre”.

“It comes from a place of not trusting the people. It comes from a place of not believing that the people of this country are the right people to take decisions about serious matters,” Ms Page said.

“The jury is something that is intangibly part of the constitution that delivers power outwards to people and doesn’t allow for it to be centralised. A certain type of person finds that very uncomfortable. They don’t like the fact that it’s not something that you can measure and control,” she said.

Ms Page said the “wantonly destructive” plans risk undermining the rule of law in Britain and damaging public trust in the system of justice that has developed for centuries.

She said the overhaul could lead to the rule of law disintegrating and “then you start to have people taking the law into their own hands”.

Ms Page is one of Britain’s leading silks, making her name as a criminal barrister working on complex criminal cases including high-profile corporate frauds.

Aside from her practice at the 23 Essex Street chambers, Ms Page also chairs the Institute of Business Ethics, an influential charity set up to research the moral issues faced by large corporations.

She came to prominence representing victims of the Post Office scandal, in a landmark appeal that saw 39 of their convictions quashed in the Court of Appeal in 2021.

However, last month she surprised the industry when she resigned from the Legal Services Board (LSB), a non-departmental government body sponsored by the Ministry of Justice, which regulates the sector.

Her exit marked a significant rebellion in the upper echelons of Britain’s legal system. The LSB board has only eight members, making her a leading figure in the regulation of the UK legal system.

She was appointed in 2020 and had originally been scheduled to step down in 2028.

Ms Page said Mr Lammy’s plans to let judges preside over the majority of criminal trials risks could give rise to scandal on a similar scale to the Post Office in future.

She said: “To put everything in the hands of a judge is a scenario that can so easily lead to miscarriages of justice and I think it will become rife if we go down this road.

“Judges are part of the establishment… It’s just not the same as 12 ordinary people who come with no preconceptions, who come ready to take their responsibilities incredibly seriously.”

Ms Page added: “Every single person has their prejudices, their preconceptions [but] what makes it worse as a judge is that you then have to go through your career listening to lots and lots of cases and starting inevitably to form your own views about certain types of case, certain types of witness, certain types of defendant.”

Ms Page warned that the record backlogs currently facing Britain’s courts will not be solved by Mr Lammy’s changes. At the same time, the Government is failing to fix “all the real things that will actually change the backlog”, she said.

The barrister pointed to long-standing issues that have worsened the court backlog, including the repeated delays in delivering prisoners to court. The problems have been blamed on the prison escort services run by third-party contractors, Serco and GeoAmey.

For a start, enforcing private contracts to deliver prisoners to court on time would save “hours and hours” and would be an easy win to help start trimming the logjam.

A Serco spokesman said: “Serco delivers over 99.8pc of prisoners to court on time.”

Supporters of Mr Lammy’s plans have argued that the overhaul would have a particular benefit for complex fraud cases, where it has been argued that juries lack the requisite knowledge and understanding to make a considered judgement.

Ms Page said this sent the message that “juries are too stupid to understand”.

“When it comes to it, these long cases involving frauds are about honesty and dishonesty. That’s what it’s always about in the end – and who better than 12 ordinary people to decide whether somebody’s acted dishonestly?” she said.

A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: “The Crown Court is on the brink of collapse, with over 80,000 cases as of December, and victims face devastating delays resulting from years of neglect.

“Through pragmatic reform, historic investment and increased efficiency, we are pulling every lever at our disposal to drive down the backlog. Victims have waited long enough – and we will deliver the swift, fair justice they deserve.”

And Holly Marshall writes:

Both England and Scotland have recently pursued criminal justice reforms which would limit the role of juries, providing important insight into how British governing elites view the public. In Scotland, failed proposals to address poor conviction rates in cases of sexual assault sought to substitute juries with trauma-informed single judges. In response to an overwhelming case backlog in England, ministers are pressing ahead with their own proposals to replace juries with magistrates for a range of non-serious offences.

These proposals differ in both rationale and scope, so it should give us pause that lay judgment in both cases is what the state has been most eager to dispense with. This suggests that a set of shared assumptions are guiding solutions to what are otherwise quite distinct problems — if not determining what those problems are taken to be.

In that case, the real issue is neither backlogs nor conviction rates but juries themselves, and by extension the public. For one thing, in posing their interventions as technical or administrative reforms, the jury is treated as a problem variable rather than a constituent element of justice or a democratic institution. Juries are interpreted as a mere legal mechanism for producing verdicts, and if those verdicts can be reached more efficiently, or indeed, more agreeable verdicts reached, then juries should be removed.

Underlying that, I suggest, is a much more deep-seated anxiety which both sets of reforms express — that ordinary people cannot be trusted to judge. In the Scottish case this was explicit. Low conviction rates in cases of sexual assault, the Scottish government claimed, were a result of juror prejudice, specifically the influence of rape myths. The Scottish public was simply too biased to fairly adjudicate a sensitive case like rape.

In the English case it is rather implied. Once judgment is viewed as an “output” and tied to efficiency, a squabbling public can only introduce risk, distortion, and procedural drag. It really does not matter, then, as others have shown, that the time saved by abolishing juries would be negligible. What matters is that the whole business of judgment be professionalised and contained in pursuit of uniform results. England wants orderly verdicts; Scotland wanted guilty verdicts.

Changes in outcome give this away. In England, defendants convicted under the reforms will lose their automatic right of appeal, as if the professional magistrate brings discipline and certainty. In Scotland, the successful abolition of the historically exceptional “not proven” verdict is equally revealing. A device uniquely suited to adjudicating what is perhaps the most difficult allegation to prove — sexual assault with no evidentiary basis beyond testimony — the verdict gave juries the means to credit a complainant’s account whilst acknowledging that the evidentiary thresholds necessary to convict had not been met.

The jury’s embrace of this third verdict necessarily came at the expense of decisive convictions. What its abolition therefore exposes about the mindset of Scottish reformers is an inability to deal with nuance. This same lack is discernible in the English reforms, notorious before the fact for doing away with juries for a range of speech offences. Having proven themselves much more judicious than magistrates in assessing meaning, intent, and harm when it comes to the words people say, English juries have shown themselves equally capable of resisting the state’s urge to classify and contain.

Most of all these examples expose a profound fear of jury agency, for they show that once jurors are allowed to exercise judgment on their own terms — acknowledging doubt, resisting false clarity, declining meanings fixed by the state — they cease to be manageable instruments of policy and become something altogether more dangerous: independent actors in the democratic sphere.

The problem with juries, then, is not that they cannot judge. Rather, it is that they judge only too freely and well, if we understand judgment, as I think we should, not as a rarefied skill or instrument for generating outputs, but as an innate capacity for navigating uncertainty and ambiguity. Political theorist Hannah Arendt, perhaps the thinker who has done most to advance our understanding of judgment, conceived of it in just these terms: judgment is needed most when easy answers fail, and all are equally capable of it when given the chance. A chance is what juries provide.

With that in mind, one of the most remarkable things about the Scottish government’s tarring of the Scottish public as uniquely prejudicial is that it rested on evidence in which the public was never placed in a position to judge at all. The proposals instead relied on a single mock jury study composed entirely of Scottish students. Are we to believe that this sample of students held especially illiberal views on rape? Or are we to believe with Arendt that there is something significant about setting jurors to the task of shared and difficult decision-making under real conditions of responsibility — conditions that force them to examine what they think and that a mock study could never capture?

What both sets of proposals disclose, then, is not the limits of juries as intended, but the limits of a political imagination that has stopped trusting the public to judge, either out of a misunderstanding of what judgment entails, as in the Scottish case, or through an uneasy recognition of its independence, and corresponding desire to contain it, as is the case for the English. This should worry us far beyond the courtroom, for both betray a weakly articulated vision of citizenship in which the public is a problem to be managed out of public life – and out of the very situations in which judgment becomes salient. Whether citizens are cast as unfit to judge the most normatively fraught questions or imagined as redundant in a broad class of ordinary cases, the premise that public judgment is suspicious and ultimately expendable always remains the same. At that point, it is not only the jury that is up for grabs, but every sphere in which ordinary citizens might claim a governing role.